An Interesting Whirlwind!
Hello everyone out on the world wide web who happens to have found this website and this blog. My name is Helen Giles and I am from Durham, North Carolina. I have lived here all my life. I am a rising senior at Jordan High School. I love animals and I love bright colors. For instance, my room is lime green and my car is orange! Anyway, another love of mine is science. I find it interesting how much it seems we know about science and, yet, when one really gets into it, how little we actually know. There is so much just waiting to be discovered, and as the famous quote goes, “knowledge is power.” The more we research and know, the more we will be able to cure diseases and advance to once unimaginable possibilities.
My experience in the Howard Hughes Precollege Program, so far, has been that of a whirlwind. I started this first week in a lab at the Duke Primate Center studying cognitive abilities in lemurs. However, due to a mix-up, I was actually moved to a lab in the Center for Human Genetics and am working under Dr. Allison Ashley-Koch. The lab study I am working with is called Healthy Pregnancy. We study different SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms)--locations within the DNA sequence where known variation occurs—to try and determine if there is correlation between the base found in various SNPs of pregnant mothers and whether or not they have maternal hypertension (also known as preeclampsia) while they are pregnant.
The first few days I was here, I wasn’t allowed to touch anything at all because I had to complete about 19 Duke on-line training courses and special lab training courses called IRB’s. They are completely annoying, but necessary, so they had to be done. Once I finished the courses, I was able to really start learning about what I was going to be doing for the rest of the summer. I met with the lab’s PI (Principle Investigator) Dr. Ashley-Koch, who explained all the different studies she supervises. Then, I met with the lab research analyst, Karen Soldano, and the research technician, Mike Rusnak, who explained more in detail about the Healthy Pregnancy study specifically.
In my lab, there is another Howard Hughes Precollege Program participant named Claire Deahl. Claire is really cool and goes to the Durham School of the Arts. We are both working in the Healthy Pregnancy study, but we will be running assays for different SNPs. My SNPs come from DNA in genes that deal with inflammatory response.
To collect data, clinicians take blood samples from pregnant women who participate in the study. The DNA is then extracted and placed into taqman plates (small plates with 384 wells in them) before I even see them. I get the plates with the dried DNA already placed into the wells as pellets at the bottom. To start performing the test, a mixture is made with distilled water, master mix, and the purple assay itself that contains fluorescent markers. This is then pipetted using an electronic repetitive multiple-tip pipette. This is really challenging to use because some of the pipette tips don’t like me. For instance, the first pipette tip and the first time it is pushed never releases a drop of anything. Oh well, I shall just have to deal and get used to it. Once the mixture is in the wells with the DNA, the plate is centrifuged. After this step in the process, I get slightly fuzzy on the rest of the steps and the order in which they are performed. I haven’t actually run any real tests yet, so I am sure that in the weeks ahead I will get the pattern down pat. All I know at the moment is that the plate is taken to a bunch of super fancy, expensive machines that do things such as screen for the fluorescent markers and analyze the plates and the DNA they contain.
So, until next time, I will be in the lab mixing concoctions and, hopefully, helping to advance research! Yay! Oh, and one of the coolest things so far has been the fact that I now have a super awesome Duke University Medical Center ID Card that makes me feel immensely important and official.
~~Helen
