Jose Luis Orozco Blog 1

My name is Jose Luis Orozco. I am going to be a fourth year student studying Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at UCLA. This summer I am continuing my research in the lab of Dr. Peter Tontonoz. Our lab focuses on lipid metabolism, lipid-responsive transcription factors and their targets. My graduate student mentor and I are currently working on a project focused on cholesterol transport.

We have identified a gene that is expressed by a transcription factor that is responsive to excess cholesterol. We believe that the protein corresponding to this gene may elucidate how cholesterol moves within the cell. From the protein’s architecture three types of domains have been identified. We have not yet determined where the protein co-localizes to, but we suspect one domain to be a lipid binding domain.This leads us to hypothesize that this protein acts a transporter for cholesterol.

We are currently working on proving that the lipophilic domain binds cholesterol. In order to do this we must clone the domain into a virus and infect cells to make our protein. Here is a gel of the elutions used for protein purification with the last well being the concentrated pure protein of interest.

 

We have also been working on cloning truncations of the protein and control domains into plasmids for transfection to eventually prove the specificity of our domains more rigorously through confocal microscopy. Here is a photo of my bacteria being plated, a typical step in the cloning process.

Here is a cool picture I took while out for lunch. It was the first time I’ve had Chee

rwine since last summer when a friend from North Carolina introduced me to it in Texas.

Paula Pelayo Summer 2016 Blog 1

Hi everyone!

My name is Paula Pelayo, a rising third year and I am conducting research this summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts as part of the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program funded by the NSF. I am working in Dr. Julie Huber’s lab studying microbes that live in hydrothermal vents. Dr. Huber and her lab go out to sea on a research vessel called the Atlantis and they use a submersible called Alvin to collect water samples form the sea floor. I am working directly with Caroline Fortunato (Postdoc) and she has taught me so much about microbial life and how we can use the DNA and RNA present in water samples to determine who is there and what are they doing?

Woods Hole is a very small town but it is full of scientists! Everybody here at the MBL is studying some form of marine life so being here is amazing because I am exposed to a whole new world of biology that I didn’t know existed. I live in a house right down the street from my lab with all the girls in my program and other internships and it’s lots of fun. We spend a lot of time at a cute coffee shop called Pie in the Sky, going to the beach, playing volleyball, biking, taking a ferry to a nearby island, and even swim at night with dinoflagellates.

My Lab is on the 3^rd floor of the Lillie building in the Josephine Bay Paul Center

Typical afternoon in Woods Hole

 

Went squid fishing on the Gemma

The Atlantis is a research vessel scientists use to conduct research worldwide and is the only vessel equipped to carry Alvin. My PI has gone on several expeditions on the Atlantis and has even gone to the sea floor in Alvin.

This is Alvin the Human Occupied Vehicle (HOV) submersible! It has room inside the titanium sphere for one driver and two scientists who can use Alvin’s robot arms to collect samples. 

Teia Noel Summer 2016 Blog 1

Hey everyone,

 

I’m Teia and I’m a rising junior majoring in Computational and Systems Biology. This past year, I spent a couple of quarters in classes where I got to hear a lot of professors talk about their projects in computational biology. I’m excited to have finally started work in Matteo Pellegrini’s lab here at UCLA, which focuses on developing and using high throughput computational techniques for genome analyses. My project focuses on the complicated relationship between the immune response and leprosy infections. The disease is defined by a spectrum, where on one end is lepromatous leprosy (L-lep), which is progressive and severe, and on the other end is tuberculoid leprosy (T-lep), which is more controlled. Additionally, L-lep generates a humoral response, while T-lep results in a cell-mediated response. While studies have already found more B-cells (in particular, those expressing the IgM immunoglobulin) present in L-lep versus T-lep lesions, B-cells and T-cells are diverse, which encourages us to learn about this topic in more detail.

I’ve been able to work with Serghei Mangul in Eleazar Eskin’s lab, who developed a cool new tool that maps unmapped reads resulting from other RNA seq analyses. The unmapped reads come from complicated RNA segments. Among these are those that code for T-cell receptors and B-cell receptors, which result from the complex processing of the TCR and BCR loci. The goal is to see if we can find any variants of these proteins in leprosy lesions in order to learn more about the different immune responses that correspond with the clinical spectrum of leprosy.

I’ve only been here for about a week and a half now, but I’ve had a blast learning loads about immunology, the UNIX operating system, and RNA sequencing techniques. I also have to say that I’ve been working pretty comfortably, since PPE is nonexistent in this dry-lab environment. I look forward to a productive summer, and to hearing about all of your experiences!

 

Teia