Filled with trepidation, I arrived at the Pittsburgh airport at 4:00 am on June 2. Not only would this be my first flight since I was five years old, but this would be my very first time traveling further west than Ohio. Exhausted, I tried my best to drown out the chatting couples, the cackling group of old friends, and the sound of music seeping from the headphones of the passenger next to me. But I couldn’t sleep, not even a wink. I was teetering on the precipice of new experiences, and I was more than ready to fall.
I arrived at Cal State San Marcos, and the program took off like a high-speed train hurtling down the scientific track of discovery. I began working on the toxin producing cyanobacteria Microcoleus. What we wanted, more than anything, was to extract high quality RNA from our samples. However, it’s hard to achieve that goal when your samples look more and more like strawberry jelly at the passing of each day. That globular mass of cyanobacteria was producing substances that were contaminating our RNA. We tried to handle this in so many ways. The first few times our extractions didn’t work, it was a major disappointment. But, we ultimately became numb to the failure and tirelessly continued searching for a solution that would unlock the toxic secrets held in the RNA. Bam! After eight weeks, we had our breakthrough! Our triumphant cheers were so loud that the next lab over cheered back through the closed door. We began preparing libraries of our samples and running quantitative PCR. Bursting with excitement, we were finally going to sequence our samples. Alas, another setback. Something misfired. Such is the nature of science itself. Discovery and innovation do not exist in a linear plane and research requires failure and persistence. I understand that, now more than ever, my personality aligns with this type of work. As someone that had begrudgingly planned on going to medical school because I had no idea what else I could do with my degree, this was an awesome discovery and experience overall. Thanks to the great mentorship and work environment that I was in during the REU program, I am without a doubt applying to Ph.D. programs. In our final week, we felt the pressure to finish our posters. Although the halls of Science Hall 2 were teeming with the anxiety of an approaching deadline, there was an underlying thread of excitement. After ten weeks of hard work, we would finally get to share the projects that had essentially become the air we were breathing for months. As we set up our posters and the room filled with visitors, the sweaty palms and nervous energy were replaced with animated passion with each new audience that arrived at our posters. The event was truly a success for each REU student personally and for the program as a whole. Over the last ten weeks, I’ve made some great friends, explored quite a bit of southern California, received awesome mentorship, and performed meaningful research on current hot button issue. Although I am sad for the haze of a perfect summer to lift, I am invigorated and empowered moving into my last year of undergrad. This is Allison Sullivan, signing off from summer research and signing on to a future as a scientist.
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First I would like to express how grateful I am to be here... the WEATHER is fantastic compared to Las Vegas, I have been completely spoiled!!! Hello my name is Jerrika Scott and I am in Dr. Sethuraman's lab where I have been working on DNA and RNA Extractions of Hippodamia convergens, also called the convergent lady beetle, which is commonly used for biological control of aphids. We have obtained two populations of H. Convergens from Kansas City and Palomar Mountain in California. We have used fava bean plants to feed the pea aphids, Acyrthosiphon pisum which the lady beetles consume in the campus greenhouse. We collected beetles from different life stages. Then we used liquid nitrogen to freeze the lady beetles, crushed the tissue with a mortar and pestle, then used the Direct-zol RNA MiniPrep Kit from Zymo Research to extract RNA. After that, we ran RNA Gels and used a Qubit fluorometer to test the integrity of the samples, and lastly we used an Illumina Tru-Seq Protocol to build RNA Libraries for Next Generation Sequencing. This week has been so hectic because our poster deadline was August 1st and presentations are going to be August 8th, I am so excited because this will be my first poster presentation, and we will get to show off all our hard work. Since this is our second to last week this was our last weekend together and we were able to spend some amazing quality time with each other. I am so proud of everyone because of how much progress we have made since the first day, I have had such a great time with all my lab members and mentors they have been such a great help these past few weeks. I can't wait for next week hope to see you there!! |
Watch this space for weekly updates!Every week, one of our CSUSM NSF REU students will post their blurb, summarizing their week, and chronicling our program. AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
August 2023
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