Week 10: The Final Post!

Hi everyone! Welcome to my last Senior Project blog post. I can’t believe these 10 weeks have come to an end–time really does fly when you’re having fun! I hope this post will be a memorable end to my project.

This week, I focused on creating my final product (a research poster) and presentation. After obtaining so many results and insights over the course of these 10 weeks, the task became to figure out how best to convey them. The research process was super nonlinear, iterative, and at times confusing (as is clear from my past blog posts…), and I needed to distill it to a clear, comprehensible format for my poster! Organizing and communicating my findings was one of the most challenging parts of the entire project.

I spent a lot of time making and revising my poster. I revised my methodology flowchart from last week to highlight key statistics and include some new analysis I did this week (filtering of pathogenic SNPs, inclusion of data on the number of unique phosphorylated NLSs, and researching SNPs’ clinical significance). I wrote the introduction for my poster by synthesizing the literature reviews I did at the beginning of the Senior Project. I created and found visualizations to help communicate the biological phenomena under investigation, both for my poster and my presentation. For example, I found figures on HDAC4 (the project’s positive control gene) that show its NLSs and key phosphosites. I put some images of my algorithm’s step-by-step outputs alongside the methodological workflow so that readers can easily follow along. Additionally, I included visualizations of the kinase trees from KinMap.

I also did some further literature review this week to put my project results in a biological context. An interesting result that I identified from my SNPs discovery pipeline was 2 high functional score SNPs in the gene USP8, which is responsible for deubiquitinating proteins, protecting cell-surface receptors like EGFR and CXCR4 from degradation, as well as regulating nucleocytoplasmic shuttling. I focused on this result and the validation of the positive control (HDAC4 gene) in my discussion section. I also identified areas for further improvement to my methodology, such as testing different NLS prediction algorithms to increase the confidence of the results.

My poster went through multiple iterations as I regularly met with my external advisor and implemented his feedback. There were some important project results that I could not directly include, as they would not fit in the space–for example, the database of SNPs I built for further bioinformatic analysis. As such, I used QR codes to link to these external files.

After finishing my poster, I worked on my presentation, focusing on the research question, methodology, results, and most importantly, my learnings from the research process. I rehearsed my presentation multiple times to get it within the 8-minute limit. It was definitely challenging to condense my work into a poster and an 8-minute presentation!

Thank you all for following along with my project. I’m excited to present on May 17th!