Week 6:
Making Progress

July 8, 2021

Some Trial and Error

As I have described before, the Yuan laboratory I have been working in this summer does research on rotavirus vaccines. On top of that amazing work, Dr. Yuan and her lab also work on norovirus vaccines. Norovirus causes symptoms similar to rotavirus, including diarrhea and vomiting, fever, stomach pain, and more. Also, like rotavirus, dehydration due to norovirus infection can be life-threatening in some cases.

Unlike rotavirus, however, there is no licensed norovirus vaccine yet. There are many being tested, however. The Yuan laboratory is currently working with a couple of nanobodies, which are a type of tiny antibodies. We were sent samples of nanobodies from a lab we are partnered with that has engineered yeast to produce these nanobodies. Our job is to test these samples with virus-like particles (VLPs) via an HBGA binding-blocking assay to see if the nanobodies effectively bind to the VLPs and prevent the VLPs from entering cells and causing infection.

This week, I continued work on the HBGA assay we have been working on for the past few weeks. However, there have been some setbacks every time we attempt the assay. We explored different substrates that we develop the final product with to develop color. We then read the absorbance values of these colors. However, we were having trouble getting the correct absorbance values. We will continue working on this assay in the coming weeks while we wait for a researcher to arrive from Argentina with quite a lot of experience with HBGA assays. We will send us the samples we have been using this past week to perfect the assay. I am extremely excited to meet her and pick her brain about nanobodies and HBGA methods and some results we would hope to see when we test the samples and VLPs. 

While I am very excited to get the assay up and running effectively, I am also grateful for the troubles we are having getting started. I am challenged to learn more about the assay when we have to troubleshoot than if the protocol worked like a charm from the start, and I think it is extremely valuable to my learning and development as a scientist. At Cornell, most of my lab experience has been with predetermined labs that the professors have had running effectively for years before me, so this experience has been a very enlightening and enriching one. 

Progress Report

Last week I wrote about all the samples we have taken the past few weeks and how excited I was to start working with them directly. This week, Sofia Schnur (a research assistant and Cornel alumni) and I ran over 100 antibody ELISA assay plates on these samples. We had three sets of samples and have tested and summarized the data for each of them. Now, we have a few re-runs to do for some samples that were not accurately summarized for one reason or another. When this is all done in the next week or two, we will begin to summarize the data as a whole, and I plan on learning how the Yuan lab analyzes this data.

I also get to look into the Flow Cytometry data I helped collect the past few weeks, which I am extremely excited about.