Week 1:
Carver College of Medicine

May 31, 2014

My fellowship started on Monday, May 19th. I’m working in the research lab of Dr. Christopher Ahern at the Carver College of Medicine, at the University of Iowa (picture). The primary focus of the Ahern Lab is on the physiology of voltage-gated ion channels (membrane proteins). It’s probably the most diverse lab in the country; out of all of us, there are only four Americans. There are two Canadians (one which is actually a Korean raised in Canada); a Brazilian (me); an English; a German; and a girl from Senegal (who has been in the States for like five years now). Next week we’ll be actually receiving this researcher from Chile, who will be here for six weeks. Suddenly I’m not the minority anymore (now there are two South Americans). It’s so much fun, we are always talking about culture and the different accents in the lab.

It’s been kind of hard for me to catch up on what everybody has been working on in the lab because there are so many different projects going on at the same time. I’ve been working closely with a Cornell alum, who has been helping and teaching me so much about the lab environment and techniques that we use. Throughout the week I helped on multiple projects at once. Right now there are five projects I’m involved in.

We’ve been working on nonsense suppression. This technique involves creating mutations at unique amino acid sites in order to incorporate unnatural amino acids in their place. This allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the structure-function relationship of the protein, as well as information on the protein’s localization, biophysical behavior, and interaction with other proteins. Although I have been working on these smaller projects simultaneously, once I have acquired the necessary skills, I will be creating a large number of mutations all along the L-type voltage-gated calcium channel (found primarily in heart cells) for further study.