Yay for research!
Hi! My name is Katie Budolfson and I’m a rising Sophomore at Duke . This summer I’m doing research in Dr. Fan Wang’s lab and my mentor is Dr. Liangli Wang. I’ve never done lab research before, so this is an entirely new experience and we had to start at the basics. It was all really confusing at first, because I didn’t know how to use any of the equipment, but I’m already starting to get the hang of things.
So I don’t know all of the details yet, but here are the basics. We’re modeling neurodegenerative diseases and analyzing the way membrane trafficking is affected by the PIK3C3 gene in mice. There are control (normal) mice and the mutant mice. I’ll section their brains, slicing them into very thin layers, and place them on slides. Then I’ll stain the slides to show different things in the brain. For example (see picture below), this week I stained them with one stain to mark for nuclei (in blue) and another stain to mark for neurons (in green). We can then compare the control and the mutant mice brain sections to see how the neurons and their layering are affected by PIK3C3.
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And this is where I work:
