Aisha Kumar, Entry #1, Introduced to the many Projects

My first week at the lab has been hectic as I was exposed to the many areas of research which are taking place here. My lab is pretty big, with about 15  people working on a variety of projects centered around the Blood Brain Barrier in Alzheimer's disease. I have not met my PI yet, because he is very busy, but Dr. Sagare has introduced me to a few people who i can observe.  I was informed that i cant actually touch anything in the lab until I take a general lab safety course first, which is next week. Meanwhile, i will just be observing what people are doing and learning the different techniques. A graduate student, Sam, showed me what he was doing with cell culturing. He took cells which are called “immortal” because they keep growing and dividing constantly. He put them in a medium (with proteins, pyruvate, amino acids etc) to help them grow. The cells are adherent, and will stick to the bottom of the cell plate when they grow. Once the cells are confluent, when they fill the whole plate, they will be moved to a new plate to grow some more. The main project i will be helping with has to do with injecting a certain drug cinamaldyhide into cells from mouse brains to see if it increased PICALM, an important protein in the brain. A vector is put into the cells which will make the protein of interest, PICALM, glow to make its abundance easy to observe. There have also been dead mice around which people are dissecting in order to observe their brain.

People cut these brains with machines to perform tests on them later. They use the machine above. Another thing people are doing is taking live mice, and performing behavior tests on them before and after the drug has been injected into them. Cassandra, a post-doc, and Sam usually don't start their experiments until about 5:30-6 so i haven't got to see what they are doing much. There is a lot going on around me which is overwhelming, but next week i will hopefully be able to help some if these projects. People usually go out and take their lunch breaks whenever they want, and come back about an hour or two later. Walking around the campus is pretty unreal. It is such a beautiful environment with tons of fountains everywhere, and statues. I even saw the Trojan statue my first day here wandering around the campus. I am excited to hopefully help out more around the lab next week!