Welcome Back

Hello, My Squishy Brethren!

Welcome back!!!! I apologize for being so slow to update--I just had the summer of my life: Working non-stop at the Sheltzer Lab (Cold Spring Harobr Lab headed by a fellow who graduated MIT while researching under Dr. Angelika Amon) was an absolute blast; I learned not only a myriad of laboratory techniques (DNA and RNA purification, transductions, transfections, qPCR, and various cancer related assays for cancer metastasis), but also got to do some great investigation into the anneuploidy paradox:

Basically, it goes as thus: In vitro, cells with extra chromosomes lag behind their peers, growing far slower than cells with normal chromosome counts. Yet, over 90% of tumors show aneuploidy and frequently possess multiple copies of not just one, but many chromosomes. How could aneuploidy, a condition that inhibits cell growth, be so intimately connected to cancer, a disease marked by rapid cell proliferation?

I may have solved part of the puzzle; reproducible scratch assays indicate that several randomly generated and specific aneuploidies increase cell motility. This hints at that the aneuploid condition may imbue certain cells with increased metastatic potential, as do preliminary qPCR results showing an upregulation of EMT-associated genes!

I also ate up another two textbooks--Molecular Cell Biology and Molecular Biology of the gene and loved them! As with the academic cell, I produced full outlines as well, but I have chosen not to upload them as doing so would take an entire day.

AND, I believe I am one of the few internet goers who can be proud of their internet search history: Okay, the NSA may be a bit concerned due to my frequenting viralzone.com, but I am proud to have completed several advanced lecture series. My "junk television" was DNews and crash course (finished the Anatomy and Physiology, Biology, Philosophy, and Economics shows).

Plus, I did more art, including some fun stuff with gourds in my mum's garden. The raptor used as the feature picture for this post is another Free Fossils project.

If you've made it to the end of this post, I congratulate you for being kind enough to put up with my shameless bragging. :D

~Rachel