So... what exactly is your project?

Sometimes, I wonder the same thing myself. But since Monday was our EMC summer workshop day, I heard this and received a general vibe of it for much of the day. And I guess I haven't made the best attempt at explaining my thoughts in a digestible manner. So I will use a different method this time, how about an eclipse analogy?

Essentially, what I am trying to do is determine whether a currently blind person was blind before looking at the solar eclipse unprotected or if the solar eclipse blinded them. The end result remains constant - a person is blind. But my job is to discover whether the most recent possibly-blinding-event (looking at the eclipsed sun without protection) is responsible for the blindness or if they were blind before the eclipse even occurred.

So, now for the worm talk! Get a sandwich or your coffee or an aspirin or whatever it is Mr. Bott always claims he needs before talking to me.

The end result of a worm that has a pro-aggregate genetic predisposition is always, destroyed glia. What I am trying to determine is if the sel-12 mutation (that makes things stick together and build up) inhibits the glia by completely killing its function from the very start of its phenotypic manifestation. Or do the plaques accumulate at too quick and too abundant a rate that the glia gradually go down? Basically, I'm trying to put things into chronological order and understand the pathway of the mutation. How it gradually, but eventually, destroys a worm's nervous system. That's probably still not very clear but if you have any questions, please contact me and I will be happy to tell you all that I know. Please remember, I'm still quite new at this.

Now, while we are on the topic of the EMC workshop, I want to say that I thought it was absolutely wonderful. Everyone was so nice and intelligent and passionate, it was pretty great. I especially liked how we went around to everyone and talked about each project and even if people had completely different types of topics, we were all contributing our thoughts and ideas to one another. We were all simply thinking and it was kind of amazing. I've tossed around the words 'a community of thinkers' in the past but I honestly did not feel as much a part of one as I did on Monday. I was also a little bit sad because I knew that the workshop on Monday signified the beginning of the end - my last year in EMC. Most, myself included, would argue that after twelfth grade, EMC just turns into life so technically it never stops or something along those lines. Anyway, I really really enjoyed our workshop and even though I had to run out at the end because I was headed to the lab, I wouldn't have minded staying in that workshop more and more.

In other news, I found out today that I kind of messed up a few things with my experiments. So the "Genewiz" place in New Jersey that sequences any DNA strains we send them, sent back my worms' results (remember the ones with like a thousand mutations)? So it turns out, I got rid of the cima-1 mutation, which was a very exciting victory, but a short-lived one. When I went back to the agar plate to maintain that supposedly mutation-free population of worms, the worms which I saw under the microscope did not, indeed have the cima-1 mutation, but they also didn't have the fluorescent green markers for the glia. So I got rid of the bad mutation but further development of the rest of the worms proved that the glia-GFP marker was also not salvaged. So what happens next is just that we have to begin again and cancel out each mutation one by one and re-sequence the DNA. Once again, this puts a little bit of a regression in the original timeline but I guess we'll see what is reasonable for me to do in the lab considering school and the loads of work that come with it.