Full Circle
So, back to where I started. After weeks of lackluster results from my AKT and ERK translocation experiments, we decided to retry our earlier SMAD translocation experiment, just to see if we got any good results. This was the same experiment that I started off with, in the first 2 weeks (check the older blog posts).
It turns out that waiting for 4 weeks did the trick. I’ve decided to put my AKT and ERK projects on the side burner for now, and really focus on the SMAD translocation assays.
Basically, like I said earlier, I’m trying to see how certain proteins interact with endoglin to facilitate their movement into the nucleus of endothelial cells. There’s a lot of different proteins that we believe have such interactions, such as ERK, AKT, and the SMADs. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see a real interaction for ERK and AKT, partly because my immunofluorescence has been so sketchy as of late. But, this is probably in part due to a bad secondary fluorescent antibody in our lab. The SMAD2 experiments do not need to use this particular antibody, and as a result, my immunofluorescence experiments have been working perfectly!
And, on top of that, I’m getting some really, really interesting data…and am managing to quantify something that Nam had a hunch about for a while now. My data has been so good, that I’ve decided to shift projects completely from the AKT and ERK project to the SMAD project within the last week.
In other words, what you heard at my chalk talk will probably not be showing up on my poster. These new results are just too hard to pass up, so time to switch gears.
It’s frustrating knowing that a lot of the data I have gathered over the last 4 weeks won’t be used this summer, but that’s research. As someone told me the other day, research can sometimes be characterized as “long periods of failure interrupted by short bursts of huge success.” And that’s basically how this summer has gone as of late.
"Success is not permanent. The same is also true of failure."
~Dell Crossword
