Week 5 Blog

Hi guys and welcome to another blog entry! This was the week I’d been waiting for! It was the week where I really got to get my hands wet and dive into lab work. It was a very busy week.

At my internship, I had to learn some immunology basics as my internship was for a cancer immunotherapy group. The experiments I was going to assist with all related to T cells and cancer, so I had to do readings about immunology. My mentor also gave me some lectures to reinforce important concepts.

I then got to help my mentor with gene cloning experiments. I helped with PCR and gel electrophoresis for a gene of interest. My favorite experiment was the mini prep for a plasmid extraction. This experiment included filtering the bacteria samples, using a centrifuge, and adding buffers to the bacteria. I also got to watch an experiment that used light sources to identify a specific protein on the mitochondria of a cell sample. All the experiments I did included a wide variety of lab equipment that were new to me. My favorite part of this NIH internship so far is all the fancy lab equipment and the fancy lab space. A nice perk is that I get my own desk in one of the labs.

My internship also includes some desk work. I had to take some virtual training lab safety training courses and attend some virtual presentations on the results of experiments my mentor had worked on. I also worked on keeping data records.

As for my research, it continues to run smoothly. I talked to some of the people I met at the NIH about my topic, and I am gaining new perspective on it. I have now started to think about how important context is when learning about cancer and how easy it is to take cancer information sources out of context.

So that was a brief summary of this very eventful week! Thanks for reading!