Author Archives: Irene Jonathan

Although I missed one day of chalk talks, the ones I did see were super interesting and impressive. I particularly enjoyed Lola’s chalk talk about morning glories. It’s a field that’s incredibly different from my own and I think that’s why it caught my attention so much. 

Lola talked about a few points from her project and I learned a lot of new information during an 8 minute period. First of all, I had no idea what introgression was, so it was highly appreciated when she gave a quick definition. What I picked up is that in the wild introgression is rare, but it is a process that can occur in morning glories. Lola talked specifically about when there are pink and white flowers that are growing at the same place and time there are more white flowers. It was suggested that pink flowers aren’t good dads because their genes aren’t favorable to be fathers. Keeping all this in mind, she posed the question of if these offspring are recombinant, and that’s what she and her lab are testing right now. 

I thought it was cool to listen to Lola’s talk about her morning glories and it will be nice to hear what the answer to her research question is.

A day in the life of the Bilbo lab usually has some routine tasks that I do every day and then usually I learn a new lab procedure. For instance, in the morning I fill syringes full of ethanol for the drinking in the dark experiment (DID) we’ll do by 3 later in the day. Then I check on the mice’s water bottles, and every week I get to weigh them. After these things get done, I usually find Julia, my mentor, and I get to learn how to do a different protocol that she’s using for one of the projects she’s working on. For instance, over the past week, we’ve been running behavioral tests on the mice we’ve been working with for our DID experiment. The first test we did was an elevated plus-maze. This is a way to quantify the anxiety response in mice. The maze is in the shape of a cross, two arms have walls that enclose them and the other two are open. We put a mouse in the center then record what they do. The more time spent in the enclosed arms, the more anxious the mice are.

photo from: https://www.e-phy-science.com/services/behavioral-tests/elevated-plus-maze/

Next, we did another test called the Barnes maze. This maze is a circular structure that has holes around the edges. One of the holes is an escape hole that the mouse goes into. We designate which hole we want that to be, then we place the mouse in the center of the circle and record how much time it takes them to find the hole. They then get to do this again 3 times. Now, this maze tests the mice’s memory because you conduct the test again the next day. Using the same escape hole, we use the same procedure, and hopefully, the mice remember where the hole was from yesterday. On the third day you switch it up, now the only thing you change is where the escape hole is. Typically, the mice go to the previous escape hole first because that’s what they remember and then it takes them some time to figure out where the new escape hole is. Since we have been running behavioral tests, the mice haven’t been drinking during their dark cycle, but usually, we give some of the mice ethanol and record how much they drink over 2 hours 3 days a week and 4 hours on Thursday. I’ve even gotten to run DID by myself. After recording the data in Julia’s lab notebook, I plug in the previous week’s data into excel and then plug the values into some statistical software that creates different graphs. 

image from: https://conductscience.com/maze/portfolio/barnes-maze/

I like that on a day-to-day basis, I’ve settled into a routine with some of my tasks and I feel pretty confident about doing them by myself. But I also enjoy how almost every day, I’m learning how to do something new, and I feel like at the end of the program I will have gained a lot of new skills.

I was able to interview my PI, Dr. Staci Bilbo this week, and while I had met her once before. It was a great experience to learn about her career journey and why she chose to be a scientist in the first place. Dr. Bilbo studied psychology and biology at the University of Texas. The research she partook in focused on the spatial navigation of frogs and lizards and this is where she fell in love with research. It was a clear path for Dr. Bilbo to continue on to grad school because for her it was the best way to pursue a career in science. During her time at school, she became interested in the concept of neuroimmune interactions. It was a novel idea at the time to study the responses we have when we are sick and the idea that the immune system was playing a role in this. After taking a class on neuroimmunology, she learned about macrophages in the brain (microglia are one of them) and how behavioral changes must involve microglia in some way. This was an incredibly new concept because it was believed up until then that microglia only caused problems in the nervous system. Moving forward to the present, Dr. Bilbo runs her lab which focuses on microglia as well as having an appointment at Massachusetts General Hospital and running a lab and retaining employees there as well. 

Besides doing research, I asked Dr. Bilbo, what are other parts of her career she enjoys and she mentioned how much she loves teaching. It is an incredibly fulfilling part of her job at Duke and she gets to teach a neuroimmunology course that no one else does.  

Lastly, I wanted to touch on what she liked about science the least. She said how sometimes there is too much emphasis on how many papers you have published and how high an impact the journal it was published in is. This mindset discourages people from taking risks in their scientific endeavors because there is a chance that your experiment will not work and if that happens you can’t publish a paper. She wishes that there was more of an opportunity to simply conduct science for the joy of it because you do not know what will happen. You are at the forefront of emerging ideas and that is incredibly exciting even if they don’t work out. In summary, Dr. Bilbo wants scientists to have a better capacity for failing and I found this to be really encouraging advice. It’s really nice to hear your PI say that it is ok to fail and that it’s part of the process.

I had such a great time talking to Dr. Bilbo, and it was really cool to learn more about her. I’m super excited to keep working with her and my other mentors in the lab.