Hey
everyone,
For the
past two weeks, my life has revolved around RNA sequencing analysis. In
particular, I’ve been trimming reads derived from leprosy lesions, and aligning
them to human and M. leprae genomes.
Alternatively, I have been submitting jobs, watching them fail, editing my
scripts, resubmitting jobs, repeating this process a few more times, and then
finally succeeding. I’ve learned a lot through all of this troubleshooting.
However, I look forward to a change in routine, as I am about to start an
exciting step in my project. Now that my reads are all groomed and mapped, it’s
time to explore data that is often ignored and left misunderstood: the unmapped
reads. Thanks to a new tool developed here at UCLA, we can analyze where these
reads come from. Amongst these reads are those that map to BCR and TCR loci,
which are left unaccounted for by other sequencing techniques due to their
complex processing. Today, I was able to successfully run the tool on a few
samples, and I’m excited to take a peak at what the results look like starting
tomorrow.
I’ve had
some cool experiences outside of the lab as well. Last week I was able to
attend a journal club that my mentor led, where we discussed computational
tools that have been recently developed to analyze antigen receptor-coding
genes. At times I felt that I was really straining my brain to make sense of
the discussions that came about during these meetings. Nonetheless, I feel that
I now have an improved understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of the tool
that I’m using, and why it is a good match for my project.
It feels
like the five weeks I’ve spent in the Pellegrini lab have flown by. I’ve
already learned so much in the short time I’ve spent here, and I’m excited that
it’s just the beginning.
Talk to
you all soon,
Teia
P.S. I
decided to put a bit more effort into taking photos this week, so here’s a
photo essay called, “Lab Is Where the Laptop Is”
*Disclaimer:
Most of my work is done in the lab; puppies and nature are very distracting.
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