Nithya Shanmugam is a Sophomore who is majoring in Neuroscience. She was awarded a Fall 2018 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on the role of microglial cell polarization in medulloblastoma therapy under Dr. Anna Kenney.
Dear Future Researcher,
If you can take away one thing from this post, understand this: Your research may not always be successful in your eyes, but it will always be interesting and driven by curiosity. Whether you’re studying C. elegans, mesenchymal stem cells, or immune system brain cells (like me!), know that there is always something to be found – a cell to target, a receptor to inhibit, or a pathway to stimulate.
I spent this summer and fall semester working at Dr. Kenney’s Lab, where I learned and re-learned several techniques, protocols, and cellular pathways while also conducting my project on the immune cells of Medulloblastoma. Medulloblastoma is a type of brain cancer of the cerebellum. With a prevalence rate of 18% among childhood brain tumors and a less than optimal standard of treatment, I’ve become invested in my research on both a technical and emotional level.
When I first started at Dr. Kenney’s lab, I was apprehensive. It’s intimidating, being amongst scientific researchers whose jobs are to determine the role and function of molecules that are less than a fraction of a micrometer in size. However, after a few days working with my mentor, Dr. Victor Maximov, I soon understood that each researcher was just following his or her curiosity to conduct new experiments and answer new questions. Research is a curiosity-driven profession at its foundation.
Alongside my mentor, I learned how to do each technique and perfect each protocol through practice. I won’t lie – I made some mistakes that I can look back at now and laugh at. It was as simple as not pipetting correctly, or as serious as mixing up which samples were in which wells of my western blot. But with repetition, these protocols have become ingrained in my brain – even if I wanted to forget at what voltage to run my western blot, I don’t think I could.
After learning these techniques, I moved on to set up my own experiments for my project. In my previous years at the Kenney lab, I had studied how the gene expression of Ccl2 affected the concentration of tumor-associated macrophages in the tumor microenvironment. In my project for this semester, I looked at how the polarization of microglial cells (a type of macrophage that permanently resides in the brain) influenced tumor cell death and proliferation. As an independent grant recipient, I had proposed a schedule for all of my experiments, following a timeline from August to December. Little did I know that all of my experiments would be pushed back due to complications with my cell culture.
All of my experiments banked on my ability to culture the microglial cells that I had extracted from mice pups. This culture should have only taken at most a few weeks, but it took close to a month and a half because I kept running into problems. Most of the time, it was that microglial cells were not detaching. Or, the culture was not pure. Through extensive troubleshooting, my mentor and I were finally able to perfect the cell culture procedure and isolate the cells for my experiments moving forward.
You would think that would be the last of my problems, but more were to come. These problems weren’t fixable though – it came in the form of my results from PCR. They didn’t exactly fit what I had expected, and I was disappointed. For a while I thought there was nothing to find – I had convinced myself that my whole research project was hopeless. However, I ran a few more experiments to try and understand the results and look at them from a different angle. My most recent experiments have interesting, though-provoking results that I cannot wait to interpret and pursue!
My research experience has been full of ups and downs and it is still ongoing. I can’t say what the future will hold in terms of my project, but I’ve found that as long as I follow my curiosity, I’ll be okay. The best advice I can offer to you is this: don’t get discouraged when your experiments don’t work, and always look beyond the results!
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