Hello Everyone! My name is Siena and this summer I am interning through Scripps Research in La Jolla, California for neuroscience. Specifically, I am interning at the Dorris Neuroscience Center under Cassandra White in the Jin Lab. While I am here I am staying and commuting with another Pinhead Intern (Katie Pumayalli) and we are both living with the Hacker family as well as their dog, Biscuit, and their cat, Cutie. The lab I am in currently is focusing on building in vivo gene editing tools to allow better analysis of gene function. With that, they can determine how different genes affect brain maturation and development. The lab also works on identifying how genes associated with ASD (Autism spectrum disorder) influence the maturing mouse brain.
This week has definitely been more of a learning week for me, when I got there on Monday I met with my mentor and she let me shadow a few of the procedures she had to do in the morning, I then attended my first lab meeting (food was provided!) and got settled into my area. On Tuesday I was given some videos to watch and topics to learn concerning the experiments and the processes that were going to be done in the lab and I got a run down on what I am going to be doing while here. Wednesday was a holiday and neither Katie nor I had to go into the lab so we took a day trip to Coronado Island. We visited the beach for a while, got smoothies, and walked around all of the little stores before getting in a 2-hour traffic jam on the way back (yikes). The route we need to take to get home at the end of the day is right next to the San Diego County Fair so we have had a few issues with traffic trying to get to the fair.
On Thursday I took quite a few notes on lab procedures and was able to watch a sample of cells get filtered and scanned for positive presence of a specific fluorescent tag. On Friday I watched my mentor do a nuclei isolation into reverse transcription from cultured cells which basically increases the stability of RNA available for further analysis. The processes create complementary strands of cDNA from the genetic material of RNA already present in the cells, therefore making double-stranded cDNA molecules for use.
That has been it for my first week, I’ve learned a lot in the past week about neuroscience, living on my own, and the San Diego Traffic Patterns. It has been crazy going from a high-schooler who had only ever driven on the freeway once in her life to interning at a Scripps Neuroscience Center in one of the most desirable places in the world (they have a parking space for the Nobel Laureate). The work that the Jin Lab is doing is really impressive and I have loved learning about it this past week! I can definitely see how this experience is going to change my life and I’m excited for whatever will come in the next 5 weeks.
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-Siena Parr
(If you want to know more about the Jin Lab here is their website: https://www.jin.scripps.edu/ )
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