My name is Emmanuel Ledesma and I am one of the interns from Olathe High School. Myself and Tyler, another Pinhead Intern, are working with the Amaro Lab at the University of California, San Diego(UCSD). My journey started on Sunday, June 24, as I flew into San Diego. I got to see part of San Diego and of the campus, as I will be staying in the dorms at UCSD.
I am working at the Amaro Lab, which is located in Urey Hall at UCSD. The program I am working at is called BioChemCoRe, which is short for Biology and Chemistry Computational Research. It was founded by Rommie Amaro and is accompanied by grad students and mentors.
On Monday I met some of the mentors I will be working with this summer, all of which are such incredible people. We started off our day by getting to know everyone in the lab as well as getting all of our paperwork in. Then, we were given an overview of what we will be doing this summer and what we hope to accomplish by the end. We were introduced to Hsp90, short for Heat shock protein 90. We will be researching this protein throughout the summer but will only be focusing on one section of the entire protein. Hsp90 is a chaperone protein that helps other proteins fold or maintain structure. Also, it helps proteins stabilize against heat stress and aids in protein degradation. In other words, heat shock proteins are expressed to help deal with stress. The Heat shock protein 90(Hsp90), means that it weighs roughly 90 kiloDaltons.
A section of the protein Hsp90
During my first days in the lab, I went through a couple coding tutorials and learned the basics. I learned a couple different types of programming language that we will be using throughout the summer. For the remainder of the week, I learned how to prepare my systems to run Molecular Dynamics(MD) in Amber. I was also introduced to Schrödinger’s Maestro software that is used for protein preparation. We were split up into groups and each group was assigned a different sections of Hsp90. There we found the ligand that is bonded to the protein, and each group had a different ligand.
The ligand 2D9 is found in Hsp90
When I wasn’t in the lab, I would spend some time at La Jolla Shores. La Jolla Shores isn’t too far from UCSD but there’s a shuttle that goes there and back during the week. I also spent time exploring UCSD and the Geisel Library is definitely one of my favorite places to be at. On Saturday, I went to the San Diego Zoo with Tyler, Ry, and Wynton. It was my first time visiting the zoo and it was such a great experience.
La Jolla Shores, San Diego
I want to thank the Pinhead Institute for this incredible opportunity. It has been such an amazing week and I am excited for what’s to come.
Nice blog Emmanuel! Glad you are learning a lot