Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

It's nice to be able to sit at the computer and blog, finally. The past week has truly been insane. I had a presentation to prepare for our lab meeting (which wound up going 30 minutes... oops) and in order to do that, I had to get a LOT more data.

It was crunch time.

In lab, I'm usually a 9:30-5 kind-of girl. This morphed into ~8 to ~6. One day I stayed till 7:30. I had several scratch wound assays to do, LOTS of immunofluorescent staining (before this past week, I had no data on it!) and had to compile my data into something that made sense for analysis. Yeah, I was busy - VERY busy. Non-stop work, except for a short lunch break when my stuff had to dry on coverslips. But it's nice to be able to sit back a little and relax. I'm still doing experiments - I'm going to scratch another set of cells tomorrow - but I have break time inbetween!

So, I'm pretty much done!

Seminars - A Look Back

So, by this point in the program, we've heard from scientists whose fields of study range from the influenza virus to complex traits and how they're formed. It's amazing how much one can do with a biology degree - and how much one can do with research!

What I liked about the seminars was finding out how people got to where they are today. This was something I could relate too, because I'm wondering where I'm going to be in 10 years (and how I'm going to get there!) For example, Dr. Benfey said he traveled around the world before finally going to grad school, and Dr. Noor revealed that he had a very mediocre GPA one semester from spending too much time in the radio broadcasting room. Most, if not all of these scientists, encountered a certain class or biological principle which really excited them and changed their views on science forever. That was really neat. And, they were all so normal; most were very approachable.

Sometimes, the stuff they were explaining was too much for me - hard to follow. This may be a clue for me that I don't want to go into their field of study. Still, though, I appreciated every one, because they all gave me insight on what it's like to be a PI/professor/full-time researcher in academia. I'm so glad these seminars were part of the Howard Hughes program!

What do I picture as my career?

Yikes, I really don't know. I would love to be involved in academia - I like universities. I think I'd really like to be a professor, too, because I love talking to people about what I know and helping them understand. I'm definitely planning a minor in Spanish since I love the language, but I also love English, so I'm thinking of minoring in English Lit/Linguistics/something. Hey, it's been done before (Post-doc at the Career panel). I know this blog assignment asked about careers and not majors, so... I guess I'll have to get back to you on that. Research is a lot of fun, but I'm not 110% sure it's for me. I think it is, but I'd like to dip my feet in for a little bit longer.

Hi internet audience! It's Saturday afternoon, too cloudy to go to the pool, and I'm resisting the urge to go spend money due to sheer boredom. Hopefully this blog will get new clothes/books/school supplies off my mind :) (But I doubt it.)

1. I'm super SUPER excited to see Harry Potter on Tuesday night. A lot of us are going to the midnight premiere at Southpoint - which means Wednesday is going to be a fabulous day for me, seeing as how I'm going to get back home at like 3am. Still, it's Harry Potter, aka it's worth it. I'm trying to think of any other midnight premieres I've been to and I can't think of any. Cool!

2. Chalk talks are over! I was so impressed by everyone's research - this stuff blows my mind! Kudos to all of the HH Research Fellows for having great presentations. I can see how Dean Nijhout thought that these were some of the best chalk talks they've ever had! I wish I could've had 2 more minutes to talk about mine, though... but board drawings can take up some time.

3. We're now over halfway done with the program, which means I'm starting to get a little frantic about data/results. I've repeated the same experiment 3 times, but my results haven't been very consistent (they're not all over the place, but they're not as comparable as we would hope). I'm about to do it a 4th time and I can usually do one a week, so hopefully I can get this fixed! I do have to say, though, that I have been improving on my Scratch Wound techniques. My scratches (with a p10 tip, down the middle of a 6 well plate which has cells growing on the bottom) are getting more even and less jaggedy than they were when I started. It was definitely nice to see such a marked improvement. Too bad the results weren't what we wanted - oh well. Such is research?

A typical microscopic viewing of a scratch wound - this one was taken at the 0-hour timepoint, way back on June 12. Magnification: 100x!

This blog will both serve as a good review for my cyberspace audience, and function as an organizational tool for my upcoming chalk talk!

Colon cancer is responsible for almost 650,000 deaths per year, according to the World Health Organization, and is the third most common cancer in the world. Much is being done in the laboratory to try to understand the biological mechanics behind tumor formation as well as tumor metastasis, which is when tumor cells spread to and infect organs besides the one they originated in.

In my lab, we work with the cell signaling pathway TGF-beta (Transforming growth factor-beta) and how it relates to various types of cancer. TGF-beta is involved in biological processes such as cell proliferation, cell migration, differentiation, and apoptosis (cell death) - it's pretty important. Gene targets of TGF-beta include several cell-cycle checkpoint genes, which make sure cells are correctly growing/replicating/mitosing before they can go on to the next stage - basically, they're tumor suppressors, because tumors are just unregulated cell growths. If cells don't have all the necessary components (chromosomes weren't replicated correctly, mitosis went wrong, etc), cells are stopped and can't progress and proliferate. TGF-beta helps make sure these cells are stopped. As it so happens, however, this pathway is commonly altered in human cancers. Specifically, a lot of colon cancer tumors can resist TGF-beta's checkpoint gene products, at least at first. Interestingly enough, though, in later stages of colon cancer, we find TGF-beta acting as a tumor promoter - it promotes cell motility and migration, as well as angiogenesis and immunosuppression, which are involved in tumor invasion and metastasis! TGF-beta works through its 3 receptors, TBRI, TBRII, and TBRIII, the latter of which was thought to be a redundant co-receptor but has just recently shown extreme promise. These three receptors activate kinases, which in turn direct transcription factors for many genes, some of which were mentioned above. In most cancers, TBRIII inhibits the ability of tumor cells to migrate (a loss of expression results in cancer progression), but colon cancer works in opposite ways for reasons yet unknown.

Essentially, my question is as follows: Does RIII regulate/mediate cell migration in colon cancer? Furthermore, is this ligand (TGFB and BMP) dependent? Based on what we've seen in other cancers, we would expect RIII would increase migration (since it works opposite from most cancers) and it would be ligand dependent.

What a semi-hazardous bike ride I just experienced.

For those who do not know, I am kind of short. Not super-short, but still mildly vertically challenged. As such, when bicycle seats are set too high, I become unhappy. By the way, the curbs around the end of Science Dr are GREAT for using to get on bikes that are too high for you. Some curbs around here are kind of short (like the ones around my apartment), which doesn't help me much. (By the way, if you were around my apartment this morning around 9:07 am and saw me fall off trying to get on the bike, please don't tell anyone.) Anyway, shoutouts to Tucker and Julian who guided me back safely (I would not advise trying to bike through the gardens at 9:30pm) and who attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to lower my bike seat. Oh, iron filaments..

Anyway, on to the topic of today's blog post: Responsible Conduct in Research! Kudos to Mr. Howard Hughes (and his constituents) for making this a required portion of this summer internship. Actually, though, even though I bemoaned to my fellow lab-mates about having to watch a 2.5 hour movie on ethics, I would do it again. You see, I was expecting some informative video (think Highschool Lab Safety videos), but I got something way different when I got to room 2231 of French Family Science Center. It was fun and entertaining - but still carried an important message beneath the surface.

There are lots of pressures that drive scientific research, as exemplified in the film. When a scary and unknown killer (such as HIV) strikes, it becomes a race against time to uncover the killer's identity and find a way to stop it. The researchers of that time were under a lot of pressure - people were dying every day, all over the country, and victims weren't restricted to a certain age group, gender, race, or sexual orientation. Someone had to figure things out, and quickly. 

Unfortunately, we face similar pressures today as we try to understand things like cancer, the H1N1 virus, and other medical mysteries. But there's also other pressures: like getting published. Scientists have to fight for a limited number of grants to fund their research; following this, there is a pressure to publish groundbreaking data in order to keep the money flowing in (this is how I understand things, anyway). This reminds me of something my mentor said when I interviewed him: he explained that the only thing he "didn't like" about science was the competition amongst researchers, and the fact that people were losing focus on what they were working for, which was learning more and bettering the world.

I don't know how to stop this from happening - maybe it never will. Maybe we just need more grants available to discourage people from fudging results in order to get funded. Maybe we should stop researchers from getting paid for working so they'd have no motivation to cheat. (Just kidding on that one). This is why I don't like ethics. There are no actual answers!!