[Modeling Fabry in C. elegans]

We thank Nour Sayed for comments and the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center (CGC) for worm strains. 

• Communication: Communication is necessary in the lab environment, especially as an undergraduate, as much of undergraduate research is a learning experience. Communicating ideas clearly to mentors and understanding their feedback is crucial to personal growth and the success of research. 

• Critical thinking: Developing experiments involves thinking deeply about experimental design. Designing an experiment to quantify, for example, the growth rate of a mutated C. elegans strain requires considering all possible variables and methods for meticulously separating/tracking individual worms or generations of worms to ensure measurement accuracy. 

• Professionalism: Accountability and punctuality are both incredibly important for time-sensitive tasks, even for something as simple as maintaining generations of C. elegans. For example, starving worms because you didn't show up to lab can add significant delays to a given experiment. 

Treatments for Fabry disease exist, but are very expensive and require a weekly/biweekly intravenous infusions, or oral treatments that only work for 30-50% of patients. This demonstrates the need for a deeper understanding of the underlying cell disfunction. Identifying analogous phenotypes in C. elegans is a first step towards a deeper understanding of Fabry disease.