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! 

Thuy Tran

Blog #1

Hi everyone,

It’s Thuy (pronounced “Twee”) Tran here at UCSD for my summer research program in the Cell and Developmental Biology department. I’m in Dr. Randy Hampton’s lab looking at generating overactive mutant E3 ligases involved in ubiquitination in the ubiquitin-proteasome protein degradation pathway. One of the largest differences between my lab at UCLA (Dr. Steven Clarke’s) and UCSD’s lab is that everything here is very green- as in everything is recycled in some way. Pipettes are glass, culture tubes are glass, plastic cuvettes are reused… and rewashed to be used again. There’s even a trash can that’s solar-powered here! I believe it’s supposed to send some kind of signal that shows it needs to be emptied or something like that.

Overall, I am enjoying my experience here. The weather is beautiful. It’s breezy and cool even when there’s a cloudless sunny sky above.  My faculty mentor is absolutely one of a kind. I can’t stress how much he’s made my experience here better. He’s very informal, super enthusiastic about everything, and used to be a comedian. And he might play the banjo. Anyway, here’re some pictures!

Blog #2

Hi everyone,

Research is going well. My project is actually very well planned, and I think it’ll be successful – I have hope!  So I’ve noticed that there are two types of people who walk down the halls in science buildings: ones who look at you and/or smile, and ones who try in every way possible to decipher the composition of the floor. It’s safe to say that this observation is true at UCSD too.

One difference between here and UCLA is that the summer panels seem to be a bit… more informative? I was in the SPUR program at UCLA last year during the summer, and the panels were great and provided lots of valuable information about grad school/applying and such, but there’s something about UCSD that is more personable. One of the biggest ideas here is stressing that when applying to graduate schools or professional schools, they’re looking for future colleagues, not students or trainees. The whole evening-out of this hierarchy is very new to me. We were also able to meet up and have lunch with the engineering/biomedical sciences faculty. I met Dr. Forbes, who was a mentor to our Dr. Tama Hasson at UCLA! Everything’s starting to connect together, and I’m very excited for the upcoming weeks here. Here are some pictures of the obstacle course we had to climb through as part of the summer program “bonding.”

Blog #3

Dear MARCees,

Summer’s over halfway done now. I’ve noticed that there are many rabbits hopping around mowing the lawn here at UCSD. They’re like the squirrels we have at UCLA, except those are a little more feral.

More about my research, I’m looking at protein degradation and regulation, specifically the HRD (Hmg-Coa Reductase Degradation) pathway. I’m generating an overactive mutant of the enzyme (Hrd1 – an E3 ligase) that catalyzes the addition of multiple copies of ubiquitin to substrate proteins, which are then recognized and degraded by the proteasome. Things are progressing as expected, surprisingly. This research is important in identifying how Hrd1 recognizes what should be marked with ubiquitin for degradation. It’s also implicated in cystic fibrosis, where a mutant protein is over-actively degraded by the ubiquitin-proteasome system, leading to an overproduction of mucus in the lungs and pancreas. This condition is potentially fatal, and approximately 1 in 29 people in the United States have this recessive allele. I can visualize my mutant overactive enzyme by looking for dim GFP colonies of yeast – the enzyme is actively degrading its substrate, which is linked to a GFP marker. The first picture has dim mutants compared to the brighter wild type control. I had about 40 plates to analyze.

Outside of lab, the summer program here has bonding events outside of campus every once in awhile. We went to Mission Bay for moonlight kayaking! It was pretty frightening because I don’t know how to swim and I don’t trust life vests. All in all, it was fun; we watched the fireworks at the bay afterwards. I found I have muscles in my arms that I never knew existed. Well, they’re so insignificant that all they do is exist. My kayak was the slowest of them all, but it left time to enjoy the midnight stroll in the bay. Here are some pictures!

 


 

Blog #4

Dear MARCees,

One of the speakers for a workshop in my program told us a fun joke: “What’s the difference between an introverted engineer and an extroverted engineer? The introverted engineer looks at their shoes while they’re talking to you, while the extroverted engineer looks at your shoes while talking to you.”

Anyway, I’ve had the most amazing time at UCSD. Their biology program is top-notch, and there are so many labs working on protein degradation research here. I am definitely considering this school for my graduate studies. Nothing really beats the weather here, and I will definitely miss the serene atmosphere of La Jolla. However, it’s time to move on back to UCLA and hit the ground running. If I learned anything from my summer research here, it’s that there’s really no time to waste and every minute counts – either for advancement in research or enjoyment in life! I hope you all have had equally or more amazing experiences during your summer.  See you at the MARC symposium!

Below is a picture of yeast colonies expressing GFP (green fluorescent protein) that I streaked into some words:

And these tags are from the summer research conference with my fellow UC LEADS Bruin: