The first week of my work experience program, I’m going to be shadowing a biochemical researcher named Dr. Rob Onyenwoke at NCCU. I began the day with an introduction to fruit flies, which are used in all of his experiments because 1) they have very similar sectors of DNA to humans, and 2) they’re invertebrates, which require less paperwork for the department. He specifically uses fruit flies who have Parkinson’s or diabetes, two metabolic diseases around which much of his research focuses on.
I was assigned to shadow his student assistant, Porsha, to learn how to flip the flies’ test tubes, then later moved on to running a general western blot and electrophoresis in order to extract a certain chemical- AMPK- that Dr. Onyenwoke believes can help mitigate the effects of the diseases on which he works. Also, I unfortunately learned that opportunities for photos were scant, as work is very focus-intensive and precise.
Later in the day, I attended a class that he co-teaches for incoming pharmaceutical science majors at NCCU- typically freshmen or sophomores. The professor today was Liju Yang, a PhD specializing in biosensors for detecting whether or not cancer drugs are successful, as well as the effects of carbon nanotubes on food borne pathogens.
Finally, Dr. Onyenwoke gave me a quick tour around the all of the biotech facilities to finish the day.
