This week has been my first real foray into the world of research, and from day one I feel like I’ve hit the ground running. I am working in the Blobe lab in the Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology, which studies a particular signalling pathway in cells called TGF-B, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be given the opportunity to work here. For numerous reasons that are potentially too lame and cheesy to address here, I’ve been very interested in cancer research for a long time, and getting to dip my toes into the current discourse is an incredibly exciting task that I am eager to undertake. I’ve spent this week slowly making my way through papers to get myself caught up on background information, and I think the biggest thing I’ve gotten from them is that TGF-B just can’t make up it’s mind about whether it wants us to live or die. This particular kinase signalling pathway demonstrates behavior as both a cancer suppressor and a cancer proliferator, which as you can imagine is really confusing. My secondary mentor focuses on a type of cell called pancreatic stellate cells and their effect on pancreatic cancer, and it’s looking like my own project will be looking at a protein called CYR61 that is crucial for cancer proliferation.
Coming into this program, having spent a few brief weeks shadowing a graduate student the summer before my senior year, I had some basic outlines of what I expected from this summer. I entirely expected the sterile benches, hoods, and pipettes, and sometimes lots of wait time between steps of an experiment, like when treating membranes with antibodies during a Western blot. What I did not expect (but probably should have) was the amount of reading that I would have to do to catch up on the research that has been done and is currently being pursued. Moreover, I didn’t expect it to be so difficult, reading passages of review papers over and over again to try and figure out what I should take away from the long and acronym-stuffed sentences. One week has not been enough time for my head to stop spinning every time someone talks to me about MiaPaCa, Panc-1, CCN1, and tons of other vocabulary that I try and fail to keep straight in my head. Furthermore, there is a disconnect in my mind between the experiments I run and what exactly their purpose is, and I am working hard (all hail Wikipedia) to bridge those two.
My goals for the summer are to learn how to be an adult and cook edible food for myself, run a migration assay perfectly with no punctate membranes (my hopes are not high for this one), wholly understand the project I am undertaking, and perhaps (!) discover something new. But most of all, I want to learn anything and everything I can, and I think I am in the perfect place to do just that.
P.S. In reference to the title, SMAD is a protein that is part of the canonical kinase signalling pathway of TGF-B, and actually comes in several varieties such as SMAD1, SMAD2, and SMAD4. One of the many things I have learned this week! I couldn’t pass up the chance for a lame pun…sorry not sorry.
