Michelle Hoy: Chemistry, Week One

My name is Michelle Hoy. I go to Montezuma-Cortez High school in Cortez, Colo. I am doing an internship with the Amaro Lab at the University of California, San Diego as part of their BioChemCoRe program. My journey started by flying from Durango, Colo. to San Diego, Calif. Once I arrived, my host family showed me around the town, and I got to see the beach. The town is amazing even though is has been foggy and cold; it should warm up soon. I am so excited about the opportunity to work in such an outstanding lab in such a great city.

On Monday morning I went in to meet my mentors at UCSD. The lead instructor is Rommie Amaro, who is accompanied by a great team of graduate students and mentors. The lab’s main focus is biology and chemistry computational research that can be used to target diseases and make drugs to fix them. After getting the paperwork turned in and meeting everyone, it was time to start working. I started out with some basic coding tutorials and other introductory courses. Once I finished the tutorials, I did some reading about my project. On Wednesday I began my project by creating codes of mutated proteins in a computer program. This process consisted of creating the molecule in a program, mutating it, changing it into codes, manually changing some of the sequences, then changing it into the correct types of files. These codes are being sent to a supercomputer to be turned into simulations so we can see what the mutations we made do to the protein. The mutations we are simulating are connected to the rare diseases acrodysostasis, which is an illness that causes facial abnormalities and shortening of some appendages, and Carney Complex, which is an illness that visually only causes skin pigment spotting, but is associated with some forms of cancers, cardiac myxomas, and endocrine tumors. I will resume work on this project once the simulations are made, which takes a week or two. While the supercomputer is processing these codes, I will be working on another project that has to do with the same protein. This project pertains to how the protein changes from inactive, to active. It’s conformation(shape) changes, but we don’t know how. So this project is trying to see how these changes occur.

This is a photo of the mutated PKA regulatory system being manipulated on the computer program “Maestro”. The mutation is A211T, which means the alanine(A) residue was changed into threonine(T). This is the mutation that causes acrodysostasis.

When I am not in the lab I spend time relaxing at home with my host family. We also sometimes take the dogs on walks at the beach! My host family has been very helpful with helping me to get around and showing me this beautiful town. I am enjoying the work here so far and look forward to continue working on these projects. I also look forward to exploring the city more and having great experiences while I am here! I thank Pinhead for allowing me to have this awesome opportunity.