Week 9 – Writing the Days Away
Anita M -
Hey guys! In my previous post, I mentioned how we thought the tunicamycin (TM) treatment on my cells was either at too high of a dose or was left on the cells for too long, causing the cells to switch from survival mode (adaptive) to programmed cell death (maladaptive). And there is a way to see if that is really the case: by running a qPCR on our previously prepared cDNA, but with apoptotic genes. If the TM treatment had caused the cells to become maladaptive (like we suspected), our qPCR test would show increased expression of the apoptotic genes. However, we searched our lab inventory and found that our lab did not have apoptotic human genes, so we won’t be able to run the test at this time. If the lab does end up purchasing them in the future, I would be very curious to run this test but until then we can only really speculate on what went wrong. Again, there is unfortunately not enough time left in the project timeframe to repeat my whole experiment, but I do hope to continue working on it through the summer and getting some definitive answers.
So as my project comes to an end, I have mostly been working on writing my research paper and creating my presentation. I’m combining a lot of my previous academic sources with knowledge about cardiac physiology (that I learned from all those readings in the first few weeks) to hopefully create a clearer understanding for my readers. This project can get pretty technical and jargon-y, making it difficult to understand and also very difficult to explain, so I wanted to create lots of diagrams/animations that can help paint a better picture of my project.
Next week will mostly be adding finishing touches to my paper and presentation, as well as practicing presenting! Thanks for reading and I hope to see you all next week!
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