Segundo Semestre Primer Post

     During the 2008 Summer, I had the opportunity to participate in the Harvard Medical School SHURP Program. I worked in the Boston Children’s Hospital in Dr. David Clapham’s electrophysiology lab. I worked characterizing the non-selective cation Transient Receptor Channel 7. I learned alot about electrophysiology, including Calcium Imaging and Whole Cell Patch clamp. Although these techniques require instrumentation that is every expensive which means I cannot do this in PR, I did learned a lot about organization and work ethic that I will be able to apply not just in my Biominds Lab but also in any lab in life. 

    For my second semester in the Biominds program I wish to accomplish a number of things. Last semester I worked on the culturing of the model organism for my studies, C. elegans. For this semester, I have a fellow undergraduate student working with me, and she has prior experience working with nematodes which I do not have since most of my work has been molecular and biochemical. After culturing these, I wish to extract and quantify the whole cell proteins of the nematode. Once I use the bradford assay to measure the concentrations, I need to identify the target proteins through Western Blotting proteins from our proposed anxiety model. 

     My work for this semester is a direct continuation from last semester work because, I had never worked with C. elegans before and last semester I became familiarize with this organism. And I learned that I am not very good at culturing this organism and this is the reason Dr. Chiesa has contracted this new student which has worked with nematodes before, so I can learn from her. This semester we will culture the worms as I did last semester and isolate thier proteins for immunoassaying. 

     This semester I hope to fully develop techniques related to the culturing since I have already isolated proteins and western blotted before. Through this program I have created a close relationship with my mentor who was my professor for two of my upper level concentration classes and I hope to continue to build this relationship and become a greater person through this last year at the UPR-Cayey and the Biominds program.