Abby's Blog: Immunology at USUHS

Entries are chronological with new ones at the bottom! Last update: July 20

July 6

Hi! I'm Abby, a rising senior who's currently interning in an immunology lab at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

The program I'm here under, USURTP, doesn't provide housing because it's mostly intended for local students. I'm able to participate by staying in DC with my aunt and commuting to and from the medical center by metro. I'm explaining this because even if you don't think you'll be able to get an internship, either because of your grades or your situation at home, you might be able to make it work. It's also a good way to meet people from other states (or other areas of NJ!)

My first week here was in all honesty pretty boring! I spent most of my time reading the immunology textbook they had provided me and watching other people use equipment I had never seen before while describing it with words I didn't understand. (I did get to see some cool stuff though, like the cells on the left! They contain the fluorescent protein GFP, which fluoresces bright green under UV light.) By the second week, I was doing some things myself, but anything I did, I did awkwardly - I accidentally drew what I was pipetting up into the filter of the pipette, dropped a slide cover into the trash while cleaning it, and knocked over a flask full of cell culture (which thankfully only ruined the filter in the lid). But as I did these things more, I got better at them and felt less self-conscious about my presence in the lab. Every scientist and lab worker goes through a training period when they don't really know what to do, and mine just happened to be now.

Of course, I'm still clumsy - just yesterday I dropped the lid of a tiny test tube full of plasmids and it rolled under the lab table (my mentor assured me as she grabbed it that it didn't matter because it was the control anyway). But I'm getting better at all the things I was terrible at my first day just by doing them! I've always been told that nothing you learn from a book can prepare you the way experience can, and it's absolutely true! Studying T-cells form a textbook is definitely important if you want to do research on them, but so is knowing the procedures for certain tests and how to set the volume on a pipette!

Because I haven't started my main project yet, I'm not going to go into details on the type of research I'm helping with in the lab. I'll get into that next week! For now, I just want to encourage as many people as possible who are interested in science but haven't had much research experience to see what it's like. Even if you end up disliking it, you'll only know through experience!

July 20

Working at the lab has become much more interesting than I expected it to based on the first few weeks. I have started working on my main project with my mentor Sasha. Once I built the trust of the people who work in the lab by watching them or doing things under close supervision, I was allowed to do more things on my own (and actually help my mentor instead of just following her around!)

Sasha's project involves T cell death. When the number of T cells in the body is too high, these cells receive a certain signal that tells them to die. (This death pathway is called restimulation induced cell death, or RICD). There are two main types of memory T cells - central memory and effector memory - and effector memory T cells are more strongly affected by this "death signal" than central memory cells. Sasha hypothesizes that this has to do with how much these cells are performing glycolysis. We can test how much glycolysis is occurring by testing the amount of lactate in the fluid that sample cells are held in.

I got to test this a few days ago by performing an L-lactate assay. This involves putting samples, reaction enzymes, a reaction buffer, and other chemicals in a multi-welled plate and then measuring the color of the resulting mixture after 30 minutes - the darker the color, the more lactate was produced.

I have also been doing some work modifying the DNA that programs for certain proteins essential to the immune response, which I will know more about (and talk about) in my next update.