Author Archives: Alexander Merriman

Hello everyone,

It is hard to believe that eight weeks has gone by so quickly. This program flew by, with the exception of this past week. I never knew how much work went into making a scientific poster, but in the end I am quite happy with how it turned out. I think I was able to learn quite a bit this summer, not only about the research in my lab and how to further my own research, but also about making scientific research a career. After hearing from numerous faculty members about their introductions to science and the path they took to their current careers, it is reassuring to know that it is perfectly fine to not know what I want currently.

This summer was invaluable in furthering my research project in the lab. I was able to learn numerous new protocols and background science pertaining to my project that I am now able to begin articulating what I would like my independent study to be down the road. Having the capacity to work full days in the lab was a helpful simulation of what life as a graduate student would be like. The jury is still out on whether or not I really enjoyed the simulation. It is quite difficult to constantly work seven days a week, particularly when the results just simply are not coming in. It takes a good deal of patience and resolve; however, it is a phenomenal feeling when those expected results do come in.

Overall, I would like to thank the HHRF program staff (Dr. Grunwald, KP, Paul, URS office) for this fantastic opportunity to engage in research and further my career as a young scientist. As I have said previously, I cannot imagine my future without some form of basic scientific research component. The next stage is figuring out what percentage of my future time I would like to spend as a researcher versus perhaps in the clinic.

Hello everyone,

For the week 7 assignment, we were asked to discuss the summer seminar series and reflect on one of the faculty talks we heard. This is a little late (sorry!), so I would like to reflect upon the talk we heard from Dr. Lefkowitz. An overarching theme from all of our faculty talks this summer was that scientific research was never an initial goal, but rather something each speaker stumbled into. Usually through the exposure to a random biology class in an undergraduate education that led to a research experience, followed by grad school, etc… Dr. Lefkowitz’s talk resonated with me, since I have wanted to be a physician since the sixth grade; however, after having been engaged in research for years, I feel incomplete without it. Dr. Lefkowitz spoke of the need to find your calling in life, a natural alignment between something you are passionate about and that you are good at, which will hopefully lead to a successful, lucrative career. Life in the lab allows an immeasurable amount of intellectual freedom that I am not quite sure you can get anywhere else. I can’t really imagine my future without some form of research component; therefore, I would like to someday be able to be both a researcher and clinician be it through an MD/PhD program, or simply get an MD and then complete a research fellowship as a physician. However, that decision is a long way down the road, but for now I know that I will continue to work in the lab I am in currently (hopefully until I graduate). I can only hope that one day I will be fortunate enough to find my calling and pursue it.

Hello everyone! This week’s assignment is to discuss the joys and woes of scientific research and how our projects are coming along. In the beginning it was rather difficult to get the Whole-mount in situ protocol working, forcing us to synthesize new probes. The largest project I was assigned for the summer was to produce a panel of whole-mount in situ (WISH) images for the nine regeneration mutants and their respective wild type siblings. For a while it looked as if this would not be possible, but at this very moment I have results for 7/9 mutants and should be able to produce images for the final two mutants this week, meaning I will have the panel of images for my poster presentation. Since I have finally ‘mastered’ the WISH protocol, I will continue on with this project throughout August and into the fall semester learning new protocols, such as sectioning fin tissue samples and staining those as well to see gene expression. Moreover, I will need to test more markers than simply Lef1, which is what I have been using throughout the past two months. Overall, I am a fan of research; however, when thinking about all the work that needs to get done it is rather daunting.

Hello Everyone! We are officially more than half way through the Howard Hughes Research Fellowship. Time if flying by and results are starting to add up in the lab. I will have a finished poster soon enough; however, this past week each HHRF participant had the opportunity to present his/her research to the rest of us. This week’s blog assignment was to write about someone else’s chalk talk that we found interesting.

One of the chalk talks I found particularly interesting was Matt’s talk on Deep Brain Stimulation. First and foremost, the idea of being able to relieve chronic back pain with external electrical stimulus is quite intriguing. However, my interest in his project was the capacity to then measure the effects of this “treatment.” I thought it was pretty interesting to be able to take qualitative data (e.g. pain maps) and transform them into significant quantitative data that could potentially shed light on the efficacy of the research. Certainly, there is much room to grow as currently the only variable being documented is the locus of pain. It would be ideal to also measure degree of pain, yet it is understandable that this variable would be difficult to measure since the investigator is dependent upon the subjective pain threshold of each patient.

Hello Everyone! It is hard to believe that we are already halfway through our summer research program, still feels as if it has only just begun. This week’s assignment is to describe a day in the life and what our labs are like.

Due to the nature of the protocols I am running, I have been getting up rather early to get started on my work so I can leave at a reasonable time each day. For the past week, I have been into the lab by 6:30AM and begin working on my whole mount in situ hybridizations (WISH). This protocol usually requires at least four hours if not more a day of work since it undergoes a variety of washes at different stages. The point of the protocol is to visually display gene expression in the tissue as previously mentioned. It requires four basic steps in the protocol, spread over three days: (1) treatment of tissue with Proteinase K to open cell membranes, (2) binding of mRNA within the cell with synthesized RNA probe, (3) binding of antibody-phosphotase with RNA probe, and (4) staining of antibodies. This past week I was finally able to get the protocol to work well with probes I synthesized the week before, and I got some quality images out of it as well (unfortunately, I will not be able to put those images on this blog). In the WISH protocol there are several washes that last anywhere from 30min to 2 hours, so I plan other experiments in the mean time to maximize my productivity. I will usually cut fins from a different mutant and place them at 33˚C overnight and fix their fins the next day for future WISH experiments. I am usually able to grab lunch around 12:30 or 1pm and then can leave the lab by 4-5pm. One thing I have really enjoyed about research is the flexibility of my schedule, as long as I get my work done I can work whatever hours I want, which has been fantastic, allowing me to get over to Wilson gym and what not. Moreover, I will be beginning to tackle some of the other projects on my summer research list in the coming weeks.

I’m definitely looking forward to the remainder of the program.

Until next time,

Alex

Hello everyone! Sorry this is a day late, the disappointing loss to Portugal made me completely forget to update my blog!

This week’s post is to describe my research project this summer. As previously mentioned, I began my tenure in the Poss lab back in January 2014. During the Spring 2014 semester I worked on a forward genetic screen in an attempt to identify the mutated gene(s) responsible for a several regeneration mutants the lab created through an ENU (mutation causing chemical) mutagenesis event. My project this summer is to now characterize these mutants based on the information we have gathered thus far, such as the gene that was mutated during the initial mutagenesis event at the beginning of the genetic screen. Since beginning my summer research project I have been running whole mount in situ hybridizations, which is a protocol that visually shows the presence of a gene in the tissue. In this case I am performing in situ hybridizations on the fins of amputated mutant and wild type zebrafish to characterize the activation of different genes at the beginning of the regeneration process and to see if the mutant has an early-stage regeneration defect caused by the mutagenesis event or a late-stage regeneration defect.

This fits into the overall lab research since the goal of the lab is to further understand the regeneration process in the fin, heart, and spinal cord.

For this week’s blog assignment, I interviewed my principal investigator, Dr. Ken Poss, to find out more about his beginnings as a scientist and to gain any advice he may have as I begin my scientific career. Dr. Poss began his scientific career preparing fly media as a Biology major at Carleton College. It wasn’t until his junior year that he began work in a biochemistry lab after taking a small seminar course and being offered the position by his professor who had HHMI funding for undergraduate research. Following his undergraduate studies, he completed a PhD in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the lab of HHMI investigator Susumu Tonegawa. As part of his PhD, he studied whether or not the knockout of a particular enzyme would have an effect on learning and memory in mice. Following his PhD studies, Dr. Poss drastically switched what he was studying and began working with zebrafish and looking into heart and fin regeneration with HHMI investigator Mark Keating at Children’s Hospital in Boston, MA. He noted that it used to be encouraged to switch what one was studying between graduate and post-doctoral studies to demonstrate that you could be successful at multiple things; however, he believes this model may be fading as different areas become more and more specialized. After completing his postdoc, Dr. Poss became a member of the Dept. of Cell Biology here at Duke University School of Medicine, where he currently resides as a James B. Duke Professor, continuing to study heart, fin, and spinal cord regeneration in zebrafish.

He has some experience teaching in the classroom, though he noted that there is not a major teaching component of his current position, since research rather than classes are the focus of graduate studies. However, he does teach a graduate level stem cell course and gives one lecture a semester to an undergraduate developmental biology class.

Dr. Poss enjoys doing science for the individualism and excitement of discovery. He finds it to be an outlet of creativity and that the benefit of being a principal investigator is you can have many projects going on at once, so although you aren’t the person discovering directly, you can still get enjoyment vicariously. In terms of advice, he advised me to “study something interesting and do it in the best way possible. Find the newest techniques and apply them to my model system before my competitors.”

One thing I took away from my discussion with Dr. Poss is that it is important to learn as much you can from your mentors. It is clear that Dr. Poss learned a tremendous amount from fantastic scientists such as Dr. Tonegawa and Dr. Keating, which presumably helped him to become the scientist he is today.

I would like to thank Dr. Poss for taking the time to meet with me for this interview and for the opportunity to continue working in his lab!

I was extremely grateful when I found out I was accepted to the Howard Hughes Research Fellowship. I have known for quite some time that I wanted to spend my summer in a lab, which made this program especially appealing since it covered both housing and stipend. I was worried I would need to work both in the lab and Chipotle (apparently there is a free burrito every shift!) after work just to come out of my summer even. However, in the end I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to participate in the HHRF and I plan to make the most of it.

I am currently employed in the Poss lab in the Department of Cell Biology. The Poss lab’s primary research goal is to study fin, heart, and spinal cord regeneration using zebrafish as a model organism. I have been employed in the Poss lab since the beginning of January 2014 and wanted to continue on this summer and into the next academic year (hopefully I can remain employed here until May 2017). I work directly under Chen-Hui Chen, PhD, on a fin regeneration project in which we identify and characterize regeneration mutants. During the spring semester I was working on a genetic screen in an attempt to identify the genes that were causing the block in regeneration for these mutants. This summer, however, I will be characterizing a couple of the mutants using several protocols new to me.

With this in mind, I would like to make the most out of my summer research experience in a number of ways. First, I would like to learn as many new protocols relevant to the lab as possible. The more techniques I learn, the better equipped I will be to begin designing my own experiments and taking on an independent project of my own. Second, I would love to be able to produce publication quality research, which I feel is a goal many of my fellow participants share. Lastly, I would like to build strong relationships amongst my fellow participants in the program. The HHRF is not my first summer research program. I participated in a summer research program last summer in Israel with 80 participants from 17 different nations. One of my favorite aspects of my summer of research in Israel was being able to build lasting friendships with people who have similar interests as myself, so I would hope to have a similar experience with this program.