Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

Somehow, somewhere along the way, I guess I got a bit behind on my blogging =X And somehow, it's now my last day... I figure it's a good time to catch up and sum it all up. 

I can't believe that it's all over already. The last time I updated this blog, I honestly still had very little idea of what my research was about and how it fit into this big picture of "cardiac development" that the Kirby Lab is interested in. And in the three or so weeks that have passed since then, I've given a chalk talk, written an abstract, created a poster, and given both a lab presentation and participated in a poster session on my research work for this summer. To say the least, it's been a crazy past few weeks. It makes me especially sad to be leaving now, especially since I finally really understand where my project is headed, and just how much more there is to do. But I guess I'll have to leave the fun to someone else.

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And, I just spent the last hour writing up the rest of a very loong blog entry... but as luck would have it, technology epically failed when I went to go save it. Go figure.
And, now, unfortunately, it's late and I really am not up to rewriting everything... So I'll just summarize:

I want to say a big, big "Thank you" to everyone at the wonderful Kirby Lab for all their support, guidance, and encouragement through out these past eight weeks. Especially to my awesome mentor Martha! I have learned so much in such a short span of time, I can hardly believe it. I am so, so sad to be leaving... but being a BME major, I guess I should also broaden my horizons a bit, and whatnot. But whereever I go, and whatever successes I have, I know will always be attributed in some way to what I have gained at the Kirby Lab this summer. So thank you so much to everyone there, for everything!

And thank you so much too, to Dean Nijhout, Mrs. Wahl, Alex, Suzanne, and all the seminar speakers who have made this summer experience so enriching. It's not only been the lab experience opportunity, but also the seminars, panels, and discussions that have made this such a great summer in terms of growth and learning. I've not only gained so many technical and research skills, but I have definitely also gotten a much better understanding of what a future in biological research looks like. It really has been a life-changing summer, for me, at least.

So, from here, I'm looking forward to a few weeks at home, then diving into my second year at Duke and a brand new lab experience (all thanks, actually, to this program). It's been a great summer

Peace.

Happy Canada Day! =] It’s July 1st (where did June go?), so as a Canadian citizen by birth, it’s time to wish my first homeland a happy birthday. It’s also Wednesday already, which means I have two blog posts to catch up on (oops!)

Responsible Conduct in Research:
From the one-sided portrayal of Dr. Robert Gallo in And the Band Played On, it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that Gallo was unethical and immoral in trying to claim the glory of the HIV discovery for himself. But rarely can docudramas properly address all sides of an issue as controversial as Gallo’s role in early HIV/AIDS research. Of course it was wrong for Gallo to try and claim all credit for discovering HIV, when, in reality, the discovery was first made by the Pasteur Institute in Paris. But the movie also glossed over the fact that it was Gallo’s work that linked HIV and AIDS; the French were the first to isolate the virus, but did not confirm virus’s connection to AIDS.

Perhaps it is a natural part to scientific research to always have this competitive drive to produce research that is more “cutting edge.” And it’s not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, it’s part of what drives our constant search for knowledge forward. For one, this competitiveness ensures that fraudulent results are caught when reported results can’t be reproduced. Additionally, the desire to produce research that is more relevant, more significant drives researchers to make discoveries that perhaps have greater potential to make some sort of positive impact. But when does this competitive sprit cross that fine line and become unethical and even destructive? Is it when researchers start squabbling over awards and titles and lose sight of the real value and meaningfulness of their work – the potential to better others’ lives? Is it when they start faking data? What drives a scientist to a point where he feels the need to fabricate data? Is it the pressure to produce results in a highly competitive or prestigious lab? Or is it the desire for personal glory? I don’t know that falsifying data can ever be forgiven, but can we forgive a researcher for having selfish motives if his/her research produces results that are impactful to the human race?

Other: Week 4 in Kirby Lab
I’ve spent the past three days this week sectioning zebrafish embryos. When I started the process on Monday, I honestly hated it. The blade on the machine was dull or dirty or something and my ribbons kept on shredding; then, the ribbons I had worked so hard to cut and arrange would stick to the glass slides and get hopelessly tangled and torn up when I put them in water. After two very aggravating hours and two sets of uselessly jumbled zebrafish sections I swore that I would avoid doing any more sectioning for the remaining four-and-a-half weeks at all costs. Yet somehow, I found myself back at the same bench the very next day with seven more embryos to section. This time, I forced myself to stay calm and be careful, instead of getting aggravated every time I messed up. And surprisingly, I started seeing my slides turn out nicely with the ribbons laid out smoothly, instead of ending up with tangled blobs of wax. If there’s one thing I really learned this week, it’s that science does take patience, which I must slowly, but surely, learn to develop.
 

The Kirby Lab as a whole is interested in studying heart development and the factors that lead to congenital heart problems. I hadn’t realized just how complex the process of cardiac development is until I came here, where each grad student is studying some different, though interrelated, aspect of heart development. My mentor Martha is specifically interested in studying the role of the neural crest cells in zebrafish cardiac development. While neural crest cell roles in mice and chick heart septation have been studied extensively, zebrafish pose a fresh and interesting question since zebrafish have only two-chambered hearts and to septa. We’re curious to see which neural crest cells are involved in the formation of the gill arch arteries and which signaling factors play a role in directing their migration. This summer I am helping Martha with her project on mapping the zebrafish cardiac neural crest cells.

Specifically, I will be looking at whether the protein endothelin-1 is required for migration of the cardiac neural crest cells to the gill arch arteries, and whether endothelin-1 is involved in the maintenance and/or formation of the gill arch arteries in our zebrafish. To that end, my work the past few weeks has revolved around injecting zebrafish embryos with morpholinos to block endothelin receptors and trying to determine whether our treatments are working. Before we can determine endothelin-1’s role in cardiac development, we have to make sure that the morpholinos are properly knocking out the endothelin receptors. From previous studies we know that when the endothelin receptors are blocked we see defects in the cartilage of the zebrafish jaw. So I’ve been doing a lot of cartilage staining recently to look at embryos injected with several different concentrations of morpholino to see if these fish show the deformed jaw phenotype we expect. Once we settle on an appropriate concentration, of morpholino, we can begin tracking and mapping the cells involved in cardiac development.  But I’ve been coming up with some mixed results this week; some of the injected embryos I just finished injecting and staining have promisingly deformed jaws, but just as many look disappointingly normal (which sounds like such a sad thing to say…). I guess this means I’ll be doing more injecting next week

So I guess that’s basically my research project so far.  For now,

Peace out.

Coming into my first research experience two (was it really just two?) weeks ago, I didn’t really know what to expect, except that this was going to be a very hands-on experience and that I would be learning a lot. But I don’t think I quite expected just how much I would be learning. These past couple of weeks I’ve learned how to fix and stain embryos, how to inject embryos with morpholinos, and how to prepare specimens following immunohistochemistry processes, among countless the other basic skills needed in our lab. I’ve also been spending quite a bit of time reading articles and books, getting up to speed on the research that has already been done in our field (neural crest cells in cardiac development).

But even now, I’m still not always sure what to expect from day to day. Working with live animals, even animals as small as zebrafish, presents many unexpected work-schedules, situations or challenges. This sometimes means coming back at 9:30pm to set up fish so that in the morning they’ll (hopefully) mate and produce embryos for injections. Just this past week, though, I crawled out of bed at what seemed like the crack of dawn to get to lab at eight in the morning to do zebrafish embryo injections. Unfortunately, it turned out the fish I had set up the night before didn’t feel like mating that morning.

Now that I’ve accumulated many practical skills, I hope to spend the next several weeks developing my skills as a researcher. I want to spend time learning how to interpret the results of the experiments I’m helping to carry out now, how to take those results forward and ask intriguing questions of them, and ultimately, how to design and set up a method to finding the answers to those questions.

Hello, world. =] My name is Dovina and I am a rising sophomore at Duke majoring in Biomedical Engineering. This summer is actually my first lab-research experience; super exciting! I am working at the Kirby Lab (http://kirbylab.mc.duke.edu/) in the Neonatal Pediatrics department of Duke Medical, where we study cardiac neural crest cells and heart development. The research put out by the Kirby lab holds a lot of promise in terms of medical application since congenital heart defects involving septation of the heart is an unfortunately common birth defect. My mentor, grad student Martha Alonzo, is especially interested in mapping the neural crest cells involved in heart development in zebrafish. The neural crest cells form a group of cells located between the neural tube and epidermis of the vertebrate embryo. They migrate to form components of the nervous system, cartilage-producing cells, smooth muscle, as well as components of several organs. Through existing research we already have a good idea of which neural crest cells migrate to form parts of the heart in mice and chicks, but the cardiac neural crest cells and their patterning of the heart in zebrafish remain a fairly unchartered territory.

I’ve spent this past week learning the basic skills required in our lab, such as how to set up the zebrafish for breeding, embryo injections, and imaging specimens. It’s been really educational and engaging. I’ve also spent a lot of time reading papers and getting up to speed on the existing research on zebrafish and neural crest cells. It’s been tiring at times; my lab time schedule can get a bit crazy some days since there are nights when I’ve had to how much I’ve learned in just the past five days! All the members of the Kirby Lab have been so awesome and nice, making me feel welcome and giving me so much help

I’ll leave you with a few pictures of our lab…

This is our office...
 

This is Martha's benchspace in the main lab area, which I use too...

And this is the fish room, where we keep all the zebrafish for breeding

Until next week, peace out =]