It has been a crazy/amazing 3 days at the Mason Lab.
I jumped into the city of Philadelphia last weekend, dragging my bulging suitcases through Wallnut street to my new apartment on the 36th. Now that was an experience. Anyways, I was more than excited to start at the Mason lab of PennVet, and after two terms of preparing myself I was ready to immerse myself into the world of canine cancer immunology.
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| The Hill Pavilion, where I will be spending 7 weeks working with the Mason lab. |
The first day I started off by chatting with the wonder Dr. Mason about the projects I will be working on. I was already introduced to the idea of PD-1 T-cell inhibition beforehand, and Dr. Mason laid out the details of her exciting research on an antibody that could resolve issues with PD-1 in canine cancer immunotherapy. After the brief overview, I was thrown right into the action. Over the first three days, I had participated in planning a protein filtration column, growing bacteria cultures, and testing antibody characteristics. The pace at the Mason lab has been a surprise, as there's a lot of things to do on several different projects all at the same time. I'm enjoying every second in the lab, as I am surrounded by an incredible amount of knowledge and talent. I can't wait to show more of my experience in the coming weeks, but the first few day has been busy, and fantastic.
Enjoy the shenanigans.
Joe Yuan
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| "Mason, Nicola Mason." (Yes, she's British.) |
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| The lab space, general science-ing & lab explosions occur here. |
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| The hood, where T-cells go to die. ~ "There's always tomorrow to correct the things you ruined today! (Assuming we can resurrect the dog)" ~ written on the glass. |
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| When our resident/ninja Martha asked random people at the hospital what a B-cell and Helper T-cell interaction would look like. |
I might start asking the AP Bio students to draw their version of what B and Helper-T cell interactions look like! Glad it's been a fun start - sounds like you will not get bored!
ReplyDeleteYeah, that would be a good idea. That drawing was actually by a resident at the vet school, shows how specializing really makes you forget. I will definitely not get bored, there's a grant due at the end of June, and I have 2 weeks to run 5 different experiments. Will report back at the end of this week if I am still alive. :)
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