Last Week

My last week of internship was focused on finishing the antibody stain presentation that I had been working on for the month’s entirety. I feel like this was my most beneficial contribution to the workplace because it is something that my mentor did not have time to do previously, but it was still lingering in the back of her head. From performing this experiment, I was able to figure out if some myosin aggregates were surrounded by membrane or not. At first, this process was rather easy, but when I went to go do the presentation slide, Mai realized that the type of muscle we were looking at was from the wrong limb. This was due to me being careless about which of the two limbs on the slide I was imaging. I was very upset with myself for misnaming these files, when it could have been easily prevented. I was lucky that \Mai noticed that I imaged and processed the forelimb rather than the hindlimb and we were able to sit together to go through and correct the file names. She saved us from presenting inaccurate information at our lab meeting on Friday. Sadly, this would mean that our initial conclusion would change completely, eliminating one of the possibilities of the aggregates having membranes.

When it was time to present to the lab, I felt that this was an intriguing topic to present about. I started off by explaining what I did and how I did it, along with how I learned about antibody stains. It started with me explaining our process and then the rest of the lab was able to converse about the next steps. It ended with even more trails than we could imagine as the members of the lab were philosophising in the name of science. We ended up having a deep conversation about what we could do next with this. What was supposed to be a five minute presentation turned into a nearly twenty minute topic and I was glad that they enjoyed it as much as I did.