This first week has been very exciting, I’m really enjoying settling into this summer’s research life and gaining more responsibility. I cook my own food, cash my own checks, and when the apartment’s water heater floods at 10:30 pm on the first night call maintenance and use the couple hours of repair to get to know my roommate. I walk through the gardens to work and plan out how and when to carry out experiments in order to address my research problem. When I get to lab I juggle the day’s time course with counting previous samples, analyzing the results, attending meetings, reading papers and learning what I need to do next. During lunch I sit down at my own desk with my coffee and my fancy keyring, my timer and my highlighted papers, and I scarf down my lunch between 15 minute time points while reading up on the Haase lab’s research. I know the HHRF program has provided so much for us, and I’m so grateful to get experience in working on a actual project and learning how to ask and answer real life scientific questions.
The Haase Lab so far has been pretty great. We may not be studying such exotic creatures as Kenyan baboons or translucent zebrafish, yet I think that a lot of the research going on here is still very interesting. Our model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is the species of yeast used in baking bread and brewing beer. It’s actually a pretty good model eukaryote for many basic cell functions. In the Haase lab, researchers are studying the transcription factor network that, along with the cyclin/CDK network, plays a large part in regulating the cell cycle of this budding yeast. Researchers at the bench gather lots of data from many different experiments with wild type and mutant strains of S.cerevisiae which have had different genes possibly related to the transcription factor network manipulated. They then collaborate with several researchers in mathematics and computer science to create and utilize several computer programs to analyze this big data, involving hundreds of genes and transcription factors, in order to decipher what different transcription factors are doing, how they are influencing each other, and how they are oscillating. In the lab I am researching a specific transcription factor involved in this network that we think helps the cells decide whether or not they should bud (S.cerevisiae’s form of asexual reproduction) based on their environment. I never realized until this week just how complicated these little yeast cells actually are.
This summer in the lab I expect to learn several skills that will be applicable to future research as well as to life in college. I plan to improve in basic areas like carrying out lab techniques, deciphering research papers, and getting the most out of meetings. However, I also look forward to learning more about the less tangible ins and outs of working in a lab and how I can be involved in the research process, one day adding to and discussing meaningful knowledge. I expect to improve at planning out my experiments and interpreting the results; with so much to do I know I will have to improve at managing my time, both in the long and short term. Overall this summer I expect to have a good first serious research experience that will help set me up to pursue research experiences during the rest of my time at Duke.
