Week 6:
University of Iowa Department of Biochemistry

July 2, 2013

Week six held many good things.  We finally have data. Hooray!  Yuan took some of the slides I had prepared with the tadpole sections to the confocal microscope where we took pictures of construct H30 expression.  It was so nice to see the results up close and with the greater resolution of the confocal.  What made the experience even better was seeing some of our tadpoles that didn’t glow bright green under the inverted microscope show GFP expression when we stained the slides using Immunohistochemistry (IHC).  Dr. Baker said that her attempts to stain for GFP which was not fluorescing brightly did not result in specific staining of GFP which made our results even more exciting.

Beyond receiving these exciting results, I also managed to attend a panel with representatives of the MD, PA, and PT departments of the University of Iowa where they talked to us about the unique aspects of each program distinguishing them from other MD, PA, and PT programs from across the nation.  But another really great networking opportunity came from casual conversation in the Baker lab which resides in the 700 core containing the Washington and Weeks labs.  Sarah was asking me what I planned on doing and she talked about U of I’s MD/PhD program which is called the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP).  Sarah asked a member of the Washington lab who was sitting near us about the program and he responded to her questions.  After Sarah had left, a member of the Weeks lab came over and said that he and another member of the 700 core were also MSTP students and that I could approach any one of them with any questions regarding the MSTP and they could get me in to talk to the director of the MSTP.  Although only 10 spots are open each year, the MSTP program sounds very interesting and challenging.

Dr. Baker called the first lab meeting where Modestos presented his work on finding proteins other than TRIP8b that complex with HCN1.  He was using a process called Immunoprecipitation (IP).  The problem he was having was finding large bands at 25 and 50 kDa in his silver stained SDS PAGE results.  He thought these bands were the light and heavy chains of the IgG he used to bind HCN1 and tried different procedures to try and remove the IgG in numerous ways.  We sat in the meeting scratching our heads trying to figure out why it wasn’t working.  Then after the meeting, they looked at the Western Blot results and realized the IgG that was supposed to only bind HCN1 also bound 2 other proteins and the IgG wasn’t specific.  This meant that the two bands that were found in all of Modestos’ experiments were the two proteins that were being bound by the IgG and Modestos needs to figure out a solution to this problem.