I thoroughly enjoyed listening to everyone’s chalk talks last week. I had spoken briefly with some people about their projects and read about everyone’s projects in the blogs, but listening to the chalk talks really clarified my understanding of the research everyone is doing. I also love the diversity of the research – when I told my friend I was doing a biological science research fellowship, he automatically assumed I was doing cancer research, which is a very narrow view of biological research (though I’m sure he was half-joking).
Out of all the research projects, Casey’s research project on mast cells stuck out to me because one of my close friends is extremely allergic to nuts. (I went on a sort-of-tangent here but I moved that down to the bottom of this post in case you want to read that tangent*). I never thought about the mechanism of anaphylaxis before, but the fact that the granules in mast cells cause cell death in endothelial cells if ingested surprised me – it seems counterintuitive that endothelial cells would ingest them if it would cause death (then again, allergies seem counterintuitive in general – though I d remember reading an article a couple years ago about research into why allergies may a good thing**). I’m really interested in hearing the results on her experiment, especially because she revealed that in the first step of the experiment, the endothelial cells did die when exposed to granules from the RBLs. I can definitely see how this research could go on in the long term and be used to develop drugs that can help fight against an allergic reaction. I can’t wait for the poster session to see the results of not only this research but also the research of my peers in this program.
*Tangent: I was on an airplane with her once when the flight attendants began passing out peanuts (which is a thing I didn’t think happened anymore, I only remember being served pretzels on flights these days, but it’s highly likely that I’m just sleeping through the flight attendants passing out food). She covered her nose with her shirt because she was worried about breathing in the allergen, and I was worried she would go into anaphylactic shock for a good while before I relaxed. Once we were also trying to find a place to eat in a mall for a good twenty minutes before settling on the Cheesecake Factory because so many places in that mall cook with peanut oil or couldn’t guarantee no nut contamination.
**I can’t remember where this article was from but if I find it I’ll post the link here.
