My Second Week- Rahul Lakhanpal

So my second week was filled with a lot of interesting material. I feel like I am really getting into swing at the lab. After spending the majority of the first week following the lab graduate and reading documents, I fully began to understand my project. I revised my original proposal to correct it with the true project. I also finished my online models of Human Serum Albumin and TNF-a. I investigated how the Human Serum Albumin could be manipulated and how it could effectively bind to TNF-a. Dr. Li, my PI, sends me on searches sometimes to answer a specific question for the day. So usually it would take me some good time to try and tackle those questions and finding proof of my answer on PubMed. On Wednesday, I got to spend some quality time with Dr. Li and followed him around to see what he was doing. Dr. Li was working on a project which used Human Serum Albumin to help with Breast Cancer treatment. I watched Dr. Li culture cells and how meticulous he needed to be. Dr. Li used a new pipette for everything, and always made sure to steralize everything to make sure no unwanted materials would enter. I watched Dr. Li use the median and such to effectively do this. The biggest project I had for this week was to write a code for a primer that I could use to put the WP9QY peptide into the Human Serum Albumin. It was interesting because all the work I had been doing in the past week, all helped me to successfully write a primer. I found a restriction site that would only cut one site in Human Serum Albumin and had to add the enzyme within my primer. On Thursday I finished my primer and we ordered it online. Despite my sense of accomplishment, Dr. Li told me that primers many times don't work properly... so we will see. My primer is set to come in on either Monday or Tuesday, so once it comes in I will begin PCR and take another huge step in my lab.

Rahul Lakhanpal