Nicholas Massenburg, Entry #4, Gaining a sense of independence

The past two weeks in the Jordan-Sciutto lab have been both extremely interesting and rewarding.

Post-doc Dan, who I have been working with for the past 6 weeks, recently recruited a Dental School student as his school year pupil as I begin to wrap up my work for the summer. Generally, in the beginning, Dan would shadow me in all of my endeavors in the lab in order to ensure that I was doing everything correctly and to promptly answer any questions whenever I had them. With some bumps in the road (including me contaminating a whole batch of RNA extract, the process of which is one of the most difficult in biology laboratory science), I was generally successful with his help. The new student, Ahn, has required a lot of Dan's time to become acclimated to the lab, and he has also enlisted me to help her with some of the laboratory logistics (with experience in medicine, she has required some assistance with laboratory science, which seems to be more my speed). She is extremely nice and easy to talk to, so helping her has been rather easy and enjoyable.

Dan is taking on two new projects, so he is passing on a bulk of our work with Stanniocalcin 2 (STC-2) and it's potential upregulation by Cinnabarinic acid to me for the remainder of my stay. He no longer sits by while I do work at my bench or on the Keyence computer microscope, something that has been scary but liberating at the same time. I find that he has prepared me extremely well to conduct reverse transcription and bulk PCR on my own, and he is still available to answer my questions, but does so much less now. I have also been left to my own whims to tabulate and quantify our results for many of the trials we have done in our experimentation, and I have been privileged to display those results to our lab PI and colleagues in other labs on campus. I plan in my last two weeks to make a presentation in our seminar meetings discussing our results and success with ER stress inducing agents such as hydrogen peroxide, thapsigargan, and most recently ritonavir, an antiretroviral medication used to exhibit the toxicity that medical overdose can cause in HIV-patients, specifically in those with HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND).

Dr. Venanzi also visited us yesterday, and I got to see some of the Philly EXPers who I don't usually see that often during the week or on weekends. I had a great time with them as well, but unfortunately returned to the lab with a stack of PCR materials waiting for me on my lab bench (thanks Dan :( ).

I have found this experience extremely rewarding, and the independent work I have done over this past week has made my experience all the more challenging, rewarding, and enjoyable. Here's to two more weeks.