Jacqueline Graniel

Post #1

Hello hello! I’m Jacqueline Graniel! Greetings from UCLA—more specifically from Dr. David Walker’s Lab in Terasaki :)! This summer has been a great opportunity to dedicate myself to conducting research [[solely!]] after an intense year of classes. 

The Walker lab is an aging lab and we use Drosophila melanogaster as the model organism. At the moment no one can say they know the mechanism behind aging. One fact of aging is that as we all age, our mitochondrial activity decreases. The lab’s perspective on aging is, if we can somehow boost mitochondrial activity, maybe we can extend lifespan.

Spending time doing research this summer brings me back to last summer—my first real research experience as a BRISURPer :-)! This summer marks ONE WHOLE YEAR that I’ve been doing research in the Walker lab and I’m still fruit fly crazy! [[They are actually making me crazy :-P]]

 

As I think back to last summer, my project has really taken off from a year ago. Last summer I worked on a project that wanted to test the relationship between stress resistance and aging as we boosted the lifespan of fruit flies through a particular yeast gene ndi1. As the quarters went by, I’ve always worked on extending lifespan through the intervention of ndi1 and as the quarters passed, the question of what ndi1 causes within the organism became most intriguing.

This quarter I’ll be trying to uncover if ndi1 extends lifespan through a known lifespan extending pathway or if it operates on a level we haven’t seen before.

Take care everyone! I’ll be back soon. 

Post #2

Hi everyone!

Being a part of the MARC SPUR group is really great. I’m living in one of the newest dorms in de neve—Gardenia. It’s nice, I don’t know how big a fan I am of community bathrooms and showers but I’m not complaining :-). My roommate is Angelica Juarez and she’s part of the CARE SEM SPUR group. She’s great; she’s kept me sane after some intense sessions this summer. In my last blog I didn’t mention anything about the weekly workshops or seminars that I’ve had the opportunity to participate in through this MARC SPUR experience. All of them have been very informative and it makes me work that much harder to be the best MD/PhD applicant. A lot of the panels make me think even further into the future, imagining different careers for myself and the determination, skills and knowledge I need to get there. It can be a bit overwhelming. What I’ve found to be really helpful has sort of become ritual for me this summer. Every time a workshop or a seminar is over I go back to lab and I talk to my direct mentor Jae and other lab members about what I’ve learned and they give me insight to their lives and their paths and advice. It really helps hone in everything I’ve been learning and help me apply to my life. I feel that this summer I’m not only learning about how to get into grad school, or how to write a killer personal statement but I’m learning about myself and what I want and what I need to be happy as scientist. I’m still a caterpillar but I think I’m getting closer to that butterfly within me!

I’ll be back to talk more about my project but for now here are two pictures of what my desk looks like. [[It’s usually clear of the mess but to truly appreciate the number of lifespans I’ve got to flip I had to spread out the sheets on the table to give you an idea. && there are more underneath it all!!]]

Have a great day!

Post #3
Hi friends!

So for this entry I wanted to give you a look into a sort of typical week for me. There are things I always need to do in lab. Not just me, every single member of the Walker lab flips flies because we’re an aging lab and to monitor the lifespans of our flies, we’ve got to flip them. Usually flies that we’re doing lifespans for are kept in vials with food on the bottom of the vial. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I flip all my flies onto new vials with fresh food. It would be so wrong to just leave them in their filth and not give them fresh food. So no matter what I’ve got going on MWF, I always have to flip. I’ve had few racks and many racks after the months of working in the Walker Lab, here are a few pix of the flies I’m currently flipping :). 

On top of my regular flips I’ve had a bunch of feeding assays to do. They assays are great because they always give results. The interpretation of those results can be a bit challenging, but there are always results. The assays though, depending on the number of genotypes of flies and how many conditions I’m looking at let me know how many of those assays need to be conducted. The assay itself is easy but time consuming! The assay consists of individually sorting flies that have been frozen into separate 1.7  microliter tubes filled with water and homogenizing each fly. These flies have previously been in vials with food dyed in blue food coloring, and so when the homogenizing and centrifuging is done, I can pipette the supernatant onto 96 well plates and then put them into a plate reader which will tell me how blue the wells are, acting as a proxy for how much food each fly ate. Great assay, not so great hands at the end of it all. Grinding up the flies individually with a little motor grinder is a killer especially since these tubes are possessed and sometimes do not cooperate with me in opening and closing. Here’s a look at a day full of fun feeding assays :-) look out for a friend vortexing my flies—helps decapitate them for me, with red eyes their heads will contaminate the blue in their guts!

Take it easy!