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July 12, 2007

Greetings from Cambridge!  I know, I'm not really off in an exotic place - I'm still living on the Harvard campus, eating HUDS food, even making that ritual run to the Tea Stop and Felipe's every few days - but the entire atmosphere of the campus is so much different over the summer.  People are relaxed, for one. Almost every weekend involves a trip into Boston or other fun activities (that don't necessarily involve hardcore partying), activities that we can enjoy on an entirely different level simply because we don't have deluges of papers and problem sets awaiting us back at home.

Yet it's not to say that the entire summer is fun and games. I'm getting my fourth taste of lab research: I started summer after sophomore year of high school in a sugar beet laboratory, then the following school year in a cancer lab, and the following summer in a mouse lab. Yet even with all that experience, I feel like I'm learning everything over again from scratch. Yes, I've run gels before. Yes, I know how a transformation works. At the same time, though, each lab has its own nuances, adding two microliters of that instead of one, adding this to the solution now instead of later, the works. The first few days I felt like a little kid, tagging along with my post-doc wherever he went and doing everything he told me to do, which was a little intimidating seeing how all the other undergrads moved about swiftly and adeptly, like they'd been doing it all their lives.

I'm now nearing the end of my fourth week at lab - apologies for the delayed first entry - and am finally gaining independence. We've even had a few new rotation students come into the lab this past week (rotation students are usually graduate students who spend a few months "rotating" between labs to decide which one they eventually want to do their thesis in), and even though they're higher on the hierarchy than me as the lowly undergrad, they still get a chance at being the little kid, following their target graduate student around everywhere, and frankly, it makes me feel a lot better about my first few days.

The basic gist of my project involves finding a more efficient way to produce transgenic zebrafish.  A transgenic organism is one that has a gene inserted somewhere into its genome, such as those bacteria that fluoresce green (or mice, for that matter). However, with the current techniques, a gene will insert itself randomly into the genome, so you can't control where it's expressed. In addition, it could insert itself into an already existing gene, disrupting that one. A few years ago, scientists have found a way to target gene insertion - in other words, figure out how to make an inserted gene go to a specific place into the genome - by using a protein from a virus. This protein recognizes two sites, one already in the organism and one on the gene that you're going to insert, and melds the two together so that your gene will always be inserted onto the specific site in the organism. They've tested this in many different animals - fruit flies, mice, mosquitoes, and frogs, to name a few - but not yet in zebrafish. That's where I come in!

So why zebrafish?  Aside from the fact that they're small and cute and smell better than mice, they have clear embryos, so you can see every step of their development very clearly.

But I haven't actually worked with fish yet. These past few weeks have involved making DNA constructs that we'll eventually inject into the fish, which basically involves purifying a lot of DNA fragments by running them on gels, and then cutting them out of the gel. In fact, this afternoon we prepared fish so that we could inject embryos tomorrow morning, and I'm so excited it's a little embarrassing.

Anyways, this has already been a grotesquely long entry, so I'll leave more for the next installment.