Amber #Entry 5 A Great Ending

Hellos,
   The last week at the lab was a great ending to my summer experience at Lopez lab. According to the result from the previous data, a new mutant 3P0/5P0 showed a great immunostimulatory ability. In order to confirm the stimulatory ability of this candidate, this week's experiment aimed to do a triplicate repeat and determine whether 3p0 tail or 5P0 is responsible for this behavior. After troubleshooting with my techniques last time, I am now more confident with running the experiments by myself.
  Alongside the main project, I also get to dig deeper about a side project I am helping my mentor with this week. The purpose of the project is to design a recombinant MF49 vaccine in vitro system. Even though the recombinant of MF49 with DVG has shown a great immunostimulatory ability in vivo, the manufacture of inexpensive, optimal vaccine depends on the success in vivo system. After reading a paper on MF49 vaccine, I had a talk with my PI about the development of vaccine in America right now. Currently, this vaccine is broadly applied in Europe but because of the censorship in America, the use of MF49 is limited. Dr.Lopez said instead of creating vaccine, the lab is trying to use MF49 as a delivery adjuvant to increase the immunostimulatory ability of vaccine.  The experiment is set up to test whether the combination of DVG and MF49 will increase the production of interferons comparing to only using one of them. In this week's experiment, different cells were cultured to knock out some immune pathway (such as interferon, ISG56 OR IL29). And the cell genome was dyed with fluorescent blue, DVG was dyed with green and viral genome was dyed with red. The data was recorded at the time point 6H, 12H, 24H after infection.

A fluorescent-detected microscope with three different channels.

Besides learning to use the microscope to take pictures, I also learned to use the program Velocity. Velocity is designed to process the cell images and do the quantifications.

The day before I left, i had dinner with all the people at my lab. Not only did they become my teachers at lab, but also my friends who I can grab lunch together and play tennis with. It has been a great experience at Upenn for these past six weeks. This was also my first chance living in an apartment alone during summer. These six weeks provided me a better understanding of how research lab works and a great chance of applying all the techniques to do real experiments! I hope everyone can enjoy the rest of the summer and see you guys in Fall!