Tag: OonaghS- Lab Sciences

To cap off my experience in Dr. Ade’s research group, I watched the conclusion of Jonathan’s most recent experiment, wherein he took measurements of the new chips he made to test if his hypothesis was correct regarding a certain mixture of polymers. As it turns out, it was only partially correct, as some of the results followed the predicted trend, while several key measurements started to vary wildly once the specimen began decaying in oxygen. As it turns out, lab work is hit or miss.

Looking back on my two weeks of observation and experience in labs, I have been given very valuable experience. As I am seriously thinking about research as a career, this time has allowed me to actually understand the scope of the field in which I may one day be employed. Experimental physics, especially, is absolutely nothing like the classroom experience I have had. I barely saw a single equation while I was here, and the whole process was very inter-disciplinary. Computer scientists, theoretical physicists, chemists, and engineers all worked together on this one project alone. As I prepare to enter college in just a short year and a half, and as I look towards garnering research experience like several of the undergrads in both of my work experience labs, it will be immensely beneficial to my own view that I already understand the patterns and realities of lab work.

In reflecting, I have also come to realize how unplanned lab work can be. Far from predictable, one off conclusion or half a micro liter of a forgotten chemical can drastically alter results, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. I, of course, always understood that a lot of this work is trial and error, but these past two weeks truly cemented this idea that mistakes are truly helpful, and that science is simply just problem solving, but with fourteen thousand dollar equipment and a lot of computer software.

For the second time this week, I saw how useful mistakes can be. When I arrived, Jonathan was talking with Abay, pointing at a sheet of numbers in Excel I couldn’t make sense of. Abay asked him, off-hand, why the numbers weren’t what they should have. It was more of a rhetorical question, and I could tell that he wasn’t looking for an answer, but Jonathan told him that he completely forgot a solvent that made up only about 0.5% of the solution. After further examination, Abay came to the conclusion that the results, considering the lack of the solvent, were very, very good and that he should continue to use that solution for future experiments. A mistake ended up lending itself to a more efficient solar cell.

But, just like yesterday, today was a day for waiting. There was only one task, for the most part: coat and seal the units so that they can be exposed to air. In their current state, oxygen would considerably damage the polymer solution on top of each substrate, explaining why the chips can only exist in the near-vacuum boxes in the lab.

The measurements requires to test the efficiency of the cell took four hours and fifty-one minutes, a time frame of which I could not stay the duration. Again, today mainly taught me the virtue of patience, and that it is necessary in any sort of lab work.

If there is anything that I learned today, it’s that patience is a virtue that doesn’t always come naturally.

What I observed today was the beginnings of an experiment that would last until about 9 o’clock tonight. I came in later in the morning, after Jonathan had spent a painstaking hour and a half sterilizing the substrate upon which the polymer “ink” would be applied. When I arrived, I was just in time to watch him remove the little chips from the final step of sterilization- a shower of UV rays.

After that, he moved to the other room of the small lab in order to insert the pieces of cleaned substrate into a vacuum-sealed hood to coat them with the polymer itself. The hoods themselves look somewhat imposing. There is an extensive series of serious-looking screens and giant valves and dials in order to purge air and contaminants from inside. But, although again time-consuming, the process isn’t that complicated.

We waited for about twenty minutes to purge the desired hood of oxygen and contaminants and then Jonathan inserted his carefully wrapped eight samples, where he coated each one in either a binary or ternary polymer solution he had made last night. Unfortunately, I could not transfer the video to my computer, but the process is not necessary to see.

Then, the waiting began. It was going to be an hour and forty-eight minutes until the samples were ready for the final step of the process. At that point, my day would be over and I would go home, while Jonathan stayed until late tonight to finish it and do even more. I’ve really discovered today that lab work can be immensely time-consuming: a fact that I had not really considered up until this point.

Today was a day for starting over. I left Dr. Rob’s lab behind (until next week when I start actually working there), and traveled to NC State’s Centennial Campus to the organic and carbon electrics lab. Bewildered by what information I could find about the lab online, I walked in not understanding much, but Abay, the man who I am shadowing, explained their entire process quite efficiently.

The research group in which I am placed is working on creating solar cells from organics, but not your typical rigid, silicon-based solar cells. Abay compared their someday solar panels to ink: it will be able to be printed on any surface, flat or drastically curved. The way that the technology works, I discovered, is a lot like spaghetti and meatballs, as Abay explained. The “ink” is a solution of tiny polymers that, just like spaghetti, naturally tend to form coils when in the solution (like pasta in water). But, they hope to turn it back into raw spaghetti, making it a straight highway for current to easily traverse for maximum efficiency. The “spaghetti” is able to transfer excited electrons into electrical energy via the “meatballs”- other polymers who appear round and bulky. The analogy, albeit simple, was pretty effective for explaining years of electrical physics research.

As the day progressed, Abay also told me about why he loved research so much- a conversation I have been eagerly looking to have with someone since my work experience started. He said that if you were to go to California, to one of the big solar factories, they’ll tour you around the factory floor and point at huge machinery that mass-produces the solar panels, but that is all you see. He told me that research is all of the tiny details leading up to the final product that really  make someone able to understand the product- not just the chemistry or physics or engineering behind it, but the hundreds of problems that have to be solved, from mysteriously-appearing zinc oxide to how to straighten “spaghetti”, its the details of the product that really make it interesting. “The title of researcher”, he said “Is also that of a ‘problem solver’.” It’s not just a bunch of people hunched over a workbench- it requires a whole set of skills and mindsets. That is what makes the whole process that much more exciting.

I apologize ahead of time for the length of this post, but a lot happened today. For my final day shadowing Dr. Rob, I spent the first half of it not anywhere remotely near Dr. Rob himself. As soon as I arrived, he handed me my labcoat and a tray of antibodies that needed to be concentrated, and sent me to the quality control lab downstairs to a man named Brent (or Mr. Brent if I wanted to be formal). His specialty lie in the rows upon rows of machines that I mentioned earlier when I first Dr. Rob took me on the tour Monday.

Brent showed me how to operate the larger centrifuge, and showed me how to properly set up the container used to filter out the unnecessary parts of the antibody liquid, which took relatively little learning before I got the hang of it.

Now, centrifuging is a bit of a time intensive process, with about half an hour in between each cycle for this (the samples probably required about eight cycles, which I unfortunately didn’t have time to complete). In the mean time, I talked with Brent about his career, what sort of research he’s done up to now, and the current projects that he’s working on. He told me about his time at Emory University, where his close friend was one of very few people who was offered an internship at the CDC in Atlanta- the center where they handle the most dangerous diseases. Apparently, when he stepped into the extensive cleaning procedure researchers are required to go through at the end of the day, failing to realize that they also cleaned inside of the “spacesuits” themselves, he immediately panicked, thinking he had been contaminated with the Ebola he had been working with all day. Additionally, Brent had been allowed to use his blood cultures to show how Ebola grows and spreads, and it turns out that the virus liked him and his blood… quite a bit.

His research now is more categorical. Most labs, like those at NCCU, have significant amount of stored compounds. Unfortunately, people often forget to fully label them or sort them at all, leading to thousands of compounds that people don’t really know the makeup of. This is where Brent’s work comes in. He uses liquid chromatography and spectroscopy in order to determine the chemical makeup of each sample. The data evaluation takes a lot of time, and is very different from his previous work mostly on cancer cells, but he enjoys it nonetheless.

Finally, after leaving Dr. Rob’s lab, I’ve come away with a few new pieces of knowledge about a lab environment. The machines are rather loud, and you’d be surprised at how much safety protocol the more experienced researchers ignore. But, on the more serious side, I’ve learned to do all sorts of things, and observe all sorts of things, that I could never see in high school. I’ve been allowed to see and experience a professional lab environment that does research with real life impacts. In addition, I’ve also come away with a summer internship. I look forward to returning to Dr. Rob’s in the months to come.

 

The beginning of today made me feel just a bit nervous. First, I was running late this morning and, as I sprinted up the front steps of the pharmaceutical science building, I nearly physically ran into the man I am shadowing this week. After profuse apologies, I also learned that he lives on the western side of Cary, which was quite a surprise. Second, Dr. Rob decided to leave me to my own devices, alone, for approximately an hour, in order to perform another protein quantification assay on my own. With scant knowledge from observing Porsha yesterday, anyone could see why I was a bit anxious. I had to mix the reagent, as well as the buffer solution, from memory, which actually did turn out well.

After diluting all 18 wells in a way that I thought was correct, I left the tray in the incubator for thirty minutes, and then for the scary part- took it to be read.

The assays are read by a rather noisy, somewhat aged machine in the biotech lab next door that requires a considerable amount of data entry before actually turning the machine on. It was the moment of truth- had I done this even remotely correct? Turns out, the answer was mostly no. After the first three wells on each row, my numbers started to get a little… off. Considerably off, if I don’t want to sugar coat it. I had help getting the machine to start from Dr. Rob’s assistant researcher named PJ, who proceeded to laugh a bit and tell me that it took her a few times to get her numbers right too, which did make me feel a little more sure.

After that, Dr. Rob had me attend a quick biosafety class, where I learned about the various biohazard levels employed in biology labs, and also a few mildly frightening stories from NCCU’s safety manager. He talked about how in labs past, he would receive after-hours calls from mildly frantic firefighters attending to a researcher who had stayed a little too long and stuck himself with a needle used to administer a blood- borne pathogen, and how in order to just work in a level 2 laboratory (out of 4, with each level drastically increasing in risk), he needed to be administered reams of vaccinations. Thankfully I don’t want to work anywhere in disease research!

Today’s work was rather time intensive. Despite working through lunch, and every other available hour, not a lot of things were actually finished, which I suppose showed me that lab work is something that requires patience. From the time that I arrived to the time that I left, Porsha and I worked on creating a protein quantification assay- a thorough process that ends up isolating the protein- AMPK in this case- in order to determine the concentration of each sample.

Dr. Rob also taught me how to pipette first thing in the morning, so I was much more involved today than I was yesterday, helping Porsha in measuring and diluting the 36 wells that we prepared.

After preparing the wells with a reworking agent (the blue-green liquid above), the tray was incubated at 37 degrees celcius in order to isolate the protein, the concentration of which is shown by the shade of violet (look at the last two rows of wells). Unfortunately, I forgot to put the reworking agent in two of the rows before the first incubation, so our process was somewhat extended because of that, but as Porsha told me “It’s lab- everyone makes mistakes, even after their first time around”.

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.