In our program this week, all BSURFers gave 8-minute ‘Chalk Talk’ presentations in which we outlined background details and the main goals of our project, almost like a drawn-out form of a paper abstract. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about the various projects that everyone was working on. It reminded me of how widespread the interesting fascinations of biology are- from ecology and bugs in Rena’s project to biochemical stabilization of protein complexes in Kyle’s project.
One talk that I found quite engaging happened to come from my lab’s next-door neighbor, the Ko lab. Sam works in the Ko lab, studying a type of bacteria called Yersinia pestis, better known as the plague. Sam did an excellent job drawing a connection between his individual project and the importance of research on the plague, citing its current high fatality rate when infected and the previous plights caused by the disease, killing nearly 1/3 of the world population at its peak. After catching everyone’s attention with the importance of his project and research on the plague, Sam dove into the details of his research.
He explained how his lab more widely was investigating a singular nucleotide polymorphism on the gene for an immunoreceptor that is associated with a change of phenotypes when infected with plague. He and his mentor are looking at the protein made by this gene, the immunoreceptor, and trying to understand the interaction between this immunoreceptor and the Y. pestis bacteria. They found previously that a particular portion of this protein on the extracellular membrane of the cell, the IG-like domains 1, 2, & 3 are interacting with the bacteria. Thus for his project, Sam is going to design mutant plasmids of this gene that remove different combinations of these IGs from the protein and overexpress this to see how this affects the interaction between the bacteria and the protein through a method called flow cytometry.
I greatly enjoyed the overall set-up of Sam’s presentation as well as the content of his research. I thought that he did a very good job of explaining the substance of his research by starting with the larger context and then explaining the more specific details of his project. I am excited to see where this project goes in the future!
