Hey, everyone! I’m Kate Barnett and this summer I am getting the awesome opportunity to intern at the George Lab at the University of California, San Diego. I started my internship on Monday, July 12th, after driving with my dad all weekend to get to beautiful La Jolla, California. I started big here, so keep reading for all of the cool experiences I had this week!
At the George Lab, led by Private Investigator Oliver George, their goal is to discover the neurobiological mechanisms and genes that cause the transition to drug addiction via the Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) study. They also aim to form pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatments to decrease addictive drug use.
INRC 2021 – Gather Town layout
On my first day, my mentor, Marsida Kallupi, acclimated me to the work environment and one of the George Lab’s main buildings – Skaggs Pharmaceutical Sciences Building. Dr. Kallupi gave me a tour of the third and fourth floor, which encased many of the rooms that the George Lab operates out of. After the tour, I attended the first day of the 3-day online International Narcotics Research Conference (INRC), where researchers shared advancements in opioid research on topics like the use and misuse of opioid management. The INRC used three platforms during the conference: Slack, Zoom, and Gather Town. In Gather Town, attendees have the ability to move around and interact with other participants, just like in real life; it’s almost like a pixelated videogame. There are also posters of unpublished research in opioid research advancement in different rooms, which I took notes on, as I would later be presenting this knowledge to a lab meeting. After the INRC ended for the day, I went to one of the George Lab’s rooms where I got to work with a volunteer, who was going into her fourth year at UCSD, and a postdoctoral researcher, named Alicia Avelar, to prepare a high sucrose solution for later analyzing synaptic living brain slices of rats, using a magnetic stirrer. This solution of mainly NaCl and sucrose provides neuronal preservation, which is super helpful for researchers/scientists because it allows them to more clearly analyze regions of the rat brain slices that may be related to drug addiction. After actually making the solution, we further had to test and adjust the solution’s pH to 7.40 and osmolarity to 290-300 mOsm/kg, using a benchtop pH meter and an osmometer.
On the morning of Tuesday and Wednesday, I attended the final two days of the 2021 INRC, viewing and reading more informational posters. After the INRC ended, I commuted to Skaggs and traveled down to the Wet Lab onto the third floor. There, I met up with a laboratory research assistant (Psychiatry), Lani Tieu, who helped me with Administration Onboarding for the George Lab and Wet Lab Access. As everyone in the lab has claimed, this onboarding process is very tedious as there are a plethora of step
Labeling test tubes for post-dissection rat organs
s to have access to anything at UCSD. This onboarding process basically consumed my Tuesday and Wednesday, filled with much paperwork reading and online lab safety training, but many lab members remained super encouraging and lent a helping hand.
On Thursday, I met more members of the George Lab, including the PI Oliver George himself, and got to see the two other buildings that the George Lab operated out of: the BSB building and the MTF building. I also got to learn more about GWAS through Lisa Maturin, the Consortium Coordinator. She explained that after rat surgeries, their organs are removed and sorted into small tubes, which are color-coordinated. For example, the blood of a rat would go into a tube with a red lid. Lisa explained that the rats’ carcasses are frozen for several
weeks before dissection, and she showed me how to label and sort all of the tubes so that in a few weeks, the tubes would already be prepared for use. Then, after the dissection would take place, the George Lab would ship these tubes out to other corporations, who request a specific organ to analyze in case of association with addiction.
This week, when I had some downtime, my dad and I went to Black’s Beach, Sunset Cliff’s Beach, the San Diego Zoo
An adorable red panda at the San Diego Zoo
, the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, and stopped by some yummy food joints! My dad and I also tried In-N-Out for the first time and it’s safe to say, it did not disappoint. Stay tuned for more awesome opportunities!
Sunset Cliff’s Beach
Tschuss, Kate Barnett
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