In the past few years I’ve become very interested in vision, so I have been really enjoying my time working in Dr. Ferreira’s opthalmology lab. Ophthalmology is the branch of medicine pertaining to eye diseases, and Dr. Ferreira’s work focuses mainly on the retina, which is the part of the eye located in the back (toward the brain) that takes in light. The “big picture” aim of the lab is to understand how certain interactions among proteins modulate retinal diseases (e.g. age-related macular degeneration).
Specifically, Dr. Ferreira and his lab team are interested in a protein called the RanBP2 protein, which is very large and has many different domains with diverse binding activity. The lab studies how one domain of this protein binds different partners, and how different domains of the protein cross-talk to enable or inhibit these bindings from happening.
For the project I am helping with, I get to do experiments with one possible signaling partner to the domain of interest on the RanBP2 protein. The real experiment will be to provide different drugs and see how they affect activation, but first we have to pretreat the cells and make sure that they will live. To this end, I have been learning and performing cell culture and western blot techniques. Cell culture is the process of expanding and maintaining a population of cells, growing them stably in an ideal environment so that the cell’s behavior can be studied in isolation from other tissues. Western blot is a technique that detects specific proteins, and we can use it to determine whether the protein of interest blocks or binds to specific molecules.
Hopefully by the end of these 8 weeks, I will have a firmer grasp on what and how exactly I am studying in my project, but in the mean time I am learning a lot from textbooks about how vision works, I am learning a lot in the lab about how research works, and I am putting these two together in my brain to learn how research connects to and shapes what I learn in the textbook.
