I started my internship at the Center for Biology of Aging at Brown University, in Professor Nicola Neretti’s lab, this week. This lab studies everything about cellular senescence, or when a cell stops proliferating/dividing. Obviously there can be age related diseases with an accumulation of old senescent cells in the body, however I was pretty fascinated to learn about the similarities senescence shares with cancer. A lot of proteins, oncogenes, and protein cascades associated with cancer are also closely associated with cellular senescence.
As I was introduced to the lab and the science being conducted in it, I was assigned to read and research literature to get a better understanding of what senescence is. I also shadowed a PHD graduate student named Anthony, the student with the most experience in the lab, and he explained how the lab used computer science and coding for research. While the experiments and gathering of data is done in the wet lab, it seems the majority of work is analyzing the data using code. In order to properly do this analysis, one has to design their own algorithm. This is what I have been doing. I take sets of data, often rather large, and code a algorithm to analyze the data for whatever I am told to look for.
For my first such assignment I was given a data set of nucleotide sequences containing 44,000 different values, with instructions to find all AAT nucleotide sequences and replace it with GGC within the larger sequence. This is how the data looked.
Then I was to create a new data set with these modified values. At first I was intimidated because it had been a while since I last coded and I was unsure how to even construct an algorithm like that. After some research and the use of Chat GPT (which Anthony and my Professor encourage for writing code) I got the hang of it. A picture of my code is featured here.
I think the research that I am involved with is very interesting and cool. I love the environment of the lab and Brown University in general. Providence, Rhode Island, is a very beautiful city and is cool to walk around and see all the colonial, New England remnants. I was exploring the campus hill one night during sunset and I captured an amazing picture, which I have included in the blog. When I am not in the lab I spend my time exploring the city and brown university campus, going to the gym, running, and cooking.
There are no comments published yet.