Hello everyone! As CURF comes to an end, I wanted to send a message of appreciation to the college for assisting with research. In this post, I will talk about how my understanding of research changed throughout the semester and what resources I used. I will also be addressing what occurred in my research and what I hope to do next. Finally, I will be showing some of my research done this semester to help fellow students in their journey to become independent researchers.

My understanding of research, in the beginning, was purely wet-lab research, which is the typical image in textbooks for research. However, through my time here at the Dutta lab, I realized that there is much more to research than wet lab research. I understand that literature searches from online databases (such as Pubmed), computer analysis, and programs also help to solidify the research done in wet-lab settings in a presentable manner for others to review. This changed for me two years ago as I realized how much desk-based or literature research needs to be done before starting a project, during the project for methods, and after a project is done for analysis. I know now that there is a fusion of computer information and wet lab research involved in formulating conclusions from your research.

Now that CURF is over, I hope to continue working in the Dutta lab and see other experiments to perform where I can learn more about the inflammatory pathways in the body. I will be performing experiments with the silencing of some specific regulatory gene expression. This will be used to determine the response in ACLY knock-out (KO) mice BMDM cells, as if there can be a restoration of the function of the ACLY gene. This will go along with the research I just performed to get a further examination of results and allow me to expand on my results from my experiment.

Some of the work I did this semester includes an analysis of how the expression of the ACLY gene affects inflammatory conditions due to the presence of oxidized LDL and controls. In my conclusions from this pilot experiment, I found out that when there is an absence of ACLY, the use of oxidized LDL (OxLDL) makes the inflammatory response less significant. The figure I uploaded shows a graph where we can see that the WT cells when treated with oxidized LDL, had a significant increase in the amount of IL-6 expression compared to the WT cells with native LDL. Here we have used interleukin-6 (IL-6) as an inflammatory marker. We know from the literature that oxidized LDL is an inflammatory agent. On the other hand, OxLDL in ACLY KO mouse cells was unable to do a notable increase in the IL-6 level. In all, I can conclude that the ACLY gene is involved in the inflammatory process which is indicated by the release of IL-6.

In essence, this semester was very exciting for me to be able to get my first independent project and I can’t wait to expand on this project next semester in the Dutta Lab!