Hello, my name is Ian Snapp, and this is the last week of my neuroscience internship at the Scripps DNC. To recap, I am working under the Ye lab studying metabolism within the nervous system. This research requires a focus on an incredibly minute scale, involving molecular biology and biochemistry manipulating DNA to change metabolic patterns inside neurons. Over the last six weeks, I have gained great insight into the procedures used within the lab to test metabolic functioning, but personally haven’t seen much of the testing stage of the procedure due to the vast amount of time needed to complete the process from beginning to end.

Monday

Unlike previous weeks, Monday began without a lab meeting due to our PI being away from work. Instead, it started with Dawn performing an ICC staining of a primary culture. This is essentially the same general process used to stain the brain slices of last week, but it was on neuronal tissue bound to a glass plate instead of a segment of a mouse brain. After watching Dawn’s procedure, I was tasked to perform a Midiprep, which I finished shortly after others’ lunch break. Once lunch was over, my last job of the day was to transfect bacteria with a few DNA samples Leyao was going to purify on Wednesday.

These are the results of testing the concentration and purity of the DNA solutions extracted during the Midiprep.

Tuesday

On Tuesday, Leyao, Dawn, Freed (I think that is how it is spelled), and I all watched a viral injection process downstairs in the surgery room. Kalie, someone who is well adept at working with mice, showed Leyao, Freed, and I during the morning how to perform for the procedure. Once she finished staining the mouse’s brain with a dye (to visualize for us how an injection works and diffuses in the brain), we all left for a lunch break. After lunch, Leyao, Dawn, and I went back downstairs to the surgery room, where Leyao practiced injecting a mouse, but with a viral solution this time. Once we finished the procedure, we noticed the mouse injected with the dye was behaving abnormally in what looked like uncontrolled movement. This, we learned, was likely due to the dye over-diffusing into the motor cortex, poisoning that part of the brain and causing brain damage. To be humane, Leyao killed the mouse after putting it on anesthesia.

After the surgeries were performed, the day was essentially done. All Dawn had to do was split some cells and Leyao had to prepare a primary culture. My last job was just to pick colonies and transfer them into an LB broth solution, preparing them for Wednesday’s Midiprep (performed by Leyao). The others quickly finished up, and they invited me to go out to eat to celebrate the internship, something I am very grateful for.

My mentors and I decided to go out to eat at a burger restaurant. From left to right (me, Dawn, Kalie, and Leyao).

Wednesday

Wednesday was cleaning day: two loads of dishes, three LB broth solutions, one TC water, three autoclave cycles to sterilize everything, and a quick tidy-up of one of the stations. Most of the day was spent tending to each cycle of the machines, but I also saw a bit of Leyao doing a Midiprep. The lab had another supplied lunch celebrating the departure of the interns and a European worker who had been researching at Scripps for the last couple of months, so I attended that, talking to my coworkers and friends. Wrapping up the day, I transfected bacteria with AAV DNA so that Leyao can create more viral capsids, but I won’t be here for that.

Thursday

Thursday was the most relaxed day of the week. Leyao was working on a viral injection on a mouse in the surgery room downstairs when I arrived but said I could pick colonies and prepare a Midiprep for tomorrow, so I began the day upstairs. Once the Midiprep preparation was complete, it was nearing 11:00, and I, along with another intern, Katie, left to go to the internship meeting up the street. There I stayed until around 1:00 pm when I left and returned to the lab to wait for Leyao to finish lunch. Together we went to the surgery room where I watched as Leyao performed yet another viral injection in four regions of the mouse’s brain. That took less time than expected, so we ended up leaving around 3:45 pm, making it an early day.

This is the bacteria culture I prepped for the Midiprep on Friday.

Friday

On my final day at the lab, I performed a Midiprep on the bacterial colony prepped on Thursday. Once I finished the majority of the Midiprep, Leyao helped as I finished the procedure to double-check my protocol, ensuring I would produce a high concentration of DNA, as my last few attempts had been slightly below average. However, with her help, I was able to raise the concentration to three times what I was previously getting. Following the little work I had to do, I drafted my blog post, talked to members of the lab, attended the lab’s happy hour (minus the alcohol part), and said my farewells to the DNC. After getting home, I spent the remaining hours packing up and getting ready for my departure on Saturday.

Saturday

Saturday, I left to travel up the coast of California to tour university campuses with the remaining gas money at my disposal. Before I left, however, I straightened up my rental and cleaned up myself.

The plan is to drive up towards LA and hopefully tour CalTech and UCLA. After that, I will continue to drive northeast back to Utah, then to Colorado, camping and exploring on the way.

Thank you to my mentors, Leyao and Dawn, my friends: Katie, Freed, and Saba, to those at SCRIPPS who helped coordinate this, and to all of Pinhead who helped make this possible. This was truly an amazing experience that helped me gain a surplus of insight into neuroscience, professional life at a lab, and into my pursuit of a career. As for the latter, it has helped me deduce that biology is likely not a field I will want to pursue past personal interests/amateur level. Let me make this clear, there is nothing wrong with the career and field of study, but it seems too narrowly focused for me. I don’t think working on a focused field like this would translate well to how I personally like to think in a more broad, bigger-picture sense. I have decided that I would like to pursue a field of science working as a researcher (thanks in part to the experience here), but I would prefer to work within the realm of physics, focusing on astrophysics. Make no mistake, I still have much to learn, but this internship has helped guide me in a way that would have otherwise cost valuable time and money within university.

Finally, thank you, the reader(s), for following my personal journey throughout the last six weeks. I am glad I could share my experiences with others