Will Wikoff, Week 5 and 6, The End is Nigh

Week 5+6

A lot has happened in these last two weeks, especially compared to the week 4 which was cut short by Independence Day.  There has been a lot of progress with my two projects which I will break down below.  Other than work, however, not much has occurred. The only thing I can think about is that one of the three high school students, including myself, left last week so we will miss him.  To celebrate we ended up getting wings at Heavenly Buffaloes (the best wings place I went to in a long time).

With that aside let me talk about my two projects- I have a morning project and an afternoon project. The morning project is with the lab manager and it comprises more of lab maintenance rather than research.  Never the less, I enjoy this line of work because it strengthens my bench work skills.  According to Jessica, the lab manager who supervises me for this part, my pipetting skills have improved tenfold since I started.  Now I am able to prep up to around thirty DNA samples per batch which greatly speeds up my project (to put that into perspective many of the undergrads who work in the lab prefer to do up to twelve at once because of the time restriction and focus required).  My project with Jessica is the continual restocking and maintenance of the two olfactory receptor libraries kept in the Matsunami lab.  While this may not sound too extreme let me just add that there are over 1500 unique gene samples kept in 1.5mL Eppendorf tubes not to mention their backups.  After ten years of being kept in a 4^oC cold room their quality has begun to degrade and I arrived at just the right time to help out with the reparation of the entire thing.  These libraries are paramount for the lab since they are our supply of genes for experiments and should they be contaminated who knows how many false positives we would encounter before we realized what happened.  Furthermore, we have made our library available to other labs and people are constantly visiting to gain samples.  During week 5 I had the responsibility of assisting Rishi, a postdoc at a lab in UCLA, in locating samples in the library which I understand the best out of the entire lab.  I got to have lunch with him and several other lab members and that was a fun experience, he was pretty cool to talk to.  I am pumped now because it seems that I will finish the human OR library of over 700 samples before I have to leave.  It doesn’t seem like much but I restructured the entire library from top to bottom so that fact that I can complete my work tingles my sense of perfectionism.

My afternoon project is where the bulk of my research takes place.  Working with Serene, a grad student in my lab, I have been studying the behavioral trends of mice when induced with predatory odorants.  Basically we are studying the innate fear response of lab rats triggered by the smell of predators (predators which the mice have no knowledge of existing).  This evolutionary trait seems to have manifested itself inside the olfactory system of mice, and perhaps other mammals.  By locating the genes which induce this effect it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of smell coding and the olfactory system.  Reading up on the field I have already found out that it is not necessarily the odorant itself which triggers the response but certain receptors activated so I am glad that we are finally conducting behavioral trials to verify this data.  My first week at this lab comprised of me designing a nocturnal environment for the mice to be studied, unfortunately we have had many, many setbacks (darn you USPS!) so I am only going to have a brief interaction with this process of the research before I return to Peddie.  However in addition to that I have had other responsibilities such as sectioning mice heads for in situ and blasting mice genomes to look for mutations.

As my time here comes to a close it seems I will have to present to the entire lab.  This is quite daunting, and I do not like it.  However, it is something that has to happen.  At least this means that my EXP poster will be lab approved before I bring it to Peddie.  I am excited for this last week but wish I could stay for eight.

Sorry for no pictures.  I am still figuring out what I can show and can't show, just playing it on the safe side.