Back In Action

Well the Summer has started and research has had to be done. Simply put on Monday (after taking part as Parade Official at Portsmouth's 124th Memorial Day parade for the Youth Advisory Commission) I packed and came to VCU quickly.

Tuesday began with the introduction of other people and the taking part in a luncheon to meet others and get acquainted with the other participants in the Honors Undergraduate Summer Research Program. It was quite interesting to find out about the many Art program participants. It was an interesting event. Immediately after it finished I quickly ran off to the Welcome Center to turn in my employment papers to be a Student Ambassadors (we get paid like 8 dollars for the tours over the summer :) ). I had to go to the Harris Hall to see the new Office of Undergraduate Admissions. After that finished I went off with one of my friends, Haris, to eat lunch at Qdoba then we met with Adeeb, and then went to their apartment.

Wednesday began with the arrival at my lab at around 1:30PM. In the morning, I spent time unpacking my room and watching the price is right. It was quite interesting seeing the show with Drew Carrey and remembering all of the sound effects from the show, I cant believe that I remembered them all. I also met with all of my roommates people. I feel a bit bad because I can not remember their names for I can not remember their names at all. During the research session I was able to get caught up on lab happenings. There are several projects going on in the lab such as a proposal for research and malaria, there is also another malaria project, another cell transporter exploration, and furthermore even more other research on schizophrenia. The only other extensive part that was covered was a bit if reading research proposals, seeing several different biology professors, and reading a proposal for a masters degree program. All in all it was an interesting day that allowed me to see the various things that can be done in a lab apart from on hands research.

Thursday involved more of the lab research. However, it started off with me plunging through a detailed paper on vesicular monoamine transporter 1 in humans that could be linked towards causing schizophrenia. The paper was only six pages but it took me about 2 hours to read through and interpret. In the meantime several professors kept coming buy to put the finishing touches on the proposal and get it sent and submitted. Needless to say, Dr. Stewart came in immediately and we went through and played around with the BLAST (NCBI) and other Geneview programs on the site in an effort to discover just where these point mutations that the paper sited occurred. It was an interesting process for we were able to collaborate with other professors in the school and get a few issues worked out on. The final thing that we now need to do is to discover the knockout regions for replicating and recombinating the piece of DNA that we believe is related to a certain part of the original gene.

Lab research has been quite interesting, I am still getting used to all of the techniques and such.



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