Hello everyone! Glad to hear everyone in
having a blast so far in their respective programs. I cant believe its already
week six of the program here at UCLA- where has the time gone?! Passing the
half way mark is bitter-sweet because although Oye is now part of the lab,
Omar, a visiting undergraduate from Vermont will be leaving soon. For some
time, I was the only undergrad in the lab and it was really fun having two
other people around.
In the past couple of weeks, I was able
to harvest the cells from the MEFS and use them for various projects. We looked
at effective knockout of ATG7, levels of LC3, and the protein NF-kB which is
involved in inflammatory response all by running a western. As you can see
below, my first western didn’t look so great (and neither did the million that
followed because each time there was a different problem) but eventually I was
able to troubleshoot the problems and finally get results.
In the upcoming weeks I will be doing more
protein expression assays and also looking at cytokine levels in my ATG7 +/+
and +/- mice due to a report that loss of autophagy leads to increased cytokine
levels. I have extracted RNA from the cells and am super excited to be working
with Dr. Scumpia’s lab in the department of dermatology to doing real time PCR
checking for cytokines.
Hope you are all doing well!
-Mona
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