It’s still technically summer, so I don’t feel bad about talking about summer semester even though we’re two weeks into the fall semester now.
I did make it through the summer and learned a good deal. The axolotls were a lotl fun and, as expected, working way outside my comfort zone and expertise was great for my mind. The labs of James Monaghan and Justin Crane were welcoming and had unending patience for their somewhat helpless REU students.
By the end of the summer, I could run protocols based on techniques that I read in passing science magazines and never thought I would try. I learned all about axolotl husbandry; something I never expected to see on my resume…
One of the genes important in regulating cell proliferation in regeneration is called Sonic Hedgehog!
With my partner, I made a technical poster with all the trappings of a professional science poster (Ask me about it sometime). We talked about some cutting edge experimental methods to make mice missing certain genes, but to change their genes only in a particular tissue and only when we decided to change their genes. We also had images of tissue samples from the mice that were lit up with fancy colors because we were doing a fluorescent analysis of RNA from genes we wanted to look at.
These are little bits attached to RNA that are lit up using a fluorescent microscope