Week 4:
Carver College of Medicine

June 18, 2014

I can’t believe I’ve been working here for four weeks already. I goes by so fast, and I’ve been learning so much.This week we kept working on projects 1 and 2. The reason we don’t work on all of the projects every week is because sometimes we might accomplish something with one of the projects, and then we just keep going with it, trying to obtain more results. The truth is that it’s very hard to focus 100% of your time on multiple projects; we always end up giving preference to one or two. So far, we’ve been trying to tackle project 1 and 2 in many different ways. With project 1, for instance, we’ve been trying to use different DNA polymerases (enzyme used during DNA replication) to try to insert the mutation we want into the gene for the protein Nav 1.5. What we ended up doing this week though, is we changed our project a little bit. Instead of trying to insert 5 mutations into the gene, we decided to try only 3. So far we haven’t had great success, but our results show that we might be on the right track. As for project 2, we’re still growing A LOT of (bacteria) cultures, in order to find those that potentially have the gene mutations we’ve been looking for.

As for life outside of the lab, Iowa City has grown on me and I’ve been having so much fun here. Everybody in our lab is very funny and nice, so we all became friends, we go out together a lot, we make fun of each other, and most importantly, we’ve all been watching the World Cup together. It’s just great. This week we watched the game between Brazil and Croatia and I couldn’t be happier, considering we beat them by 3X1. Now let’s just wait and see who wins this thing. Since we have people from so many different countries, each person is cheering for their own country and I’ll try to make the Americans root for Brazil, since they’re not all that interested in soccer after all.