I am now officially past the five week mark and half way done with my internship! Time has definitely flown here at the Human Performance Lab and looking back over the last several weeks, I’m amazed at how much I’ve learned and how generous everyone at the lab has been with their time, expertise, and bodily fluids (see previous posts). As I’ve described in previous posts, most of my time thus far has been spent learning new techniques, helping out with the various protocols the lab is running, and working on my GR project. Despite now having generated any data at this point, I feel that I have been able to do a significant amount of background research, which has allowed me to write a comprehensive introduction to my project (minus my findings of course) and develop a pretty solid plan for when the ELISA kits arrive and I can actually start analyzing samples. As I had mentioned in a previous post, one concern had been that since the samples consisted of frozen buffy coat with lots of red blood cells mixed in, the hemoglobin that would be freed (thawing blood cells tends to hemolyze them) might interfere with the ELISA by binding to the GR antibodies. However, after a lengthy talk with manufacturer of the kit, I believe this shouldn’t be a problem. While I have yet to test this theory, I was assured that for whatever reason, the GR antibody complex would fluoresce at a unique wavelength making identification accurate possible.
In other news this week, I learned how to use the lab’s new human DNA isolation/quantification kit had the opportunity to test out some new sweat patches that the lab is trying to incorporate into one of the heat tolerance studies because they might offer a much less invasive way to measure caffein and chemokines than sticking subjects with a needle and taking blood. Basically, I just jogged for an hour in the heat chamber to ensure they had plenty of sweat to work with. Looking forward, Josh has assured me my kits are on the way and I will try to have my PI (primary investigator) take a look at my abstract and introduction drafts so they are ready all set when poster time comes around.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2011 at 12:53 am by Zach Smith '13 and is filed under The Latest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.