Hello all, and welcome to my final blog! Thank you to all of those who have been following along as I have gone through this incredible experience! A huge thanks of course to the Ting Wu genetics lab; to Fei Zhao and Laura Breimann for being such wonderful mentors, scientists, and people in general, and of course, Ting Wu for allowing me to be a part of the incredible lab environment she’s built. I have learned so much from each and every person in the lab, and I will never forget this amazing experience, all that I’ve learned, and all of the amazing people who bestowed that knowledge on me.
With that said, I’ll jump right in to my last week at the lab! Using the data that we’ve been collecting to answer our individual questions requires a lot of code and analysis, which is what has consumed most of my time the past two weeks. Along with this though, we began working on a presentation about our internship and our findings concerning our project. Being our last week, Fei also organized for some members of the lab to come give us lectures about their work so that we could get a well-rounded view of the work being done in the lab! Monday consisted of coding to create a batch-processing script that would run through all 20 of our 56-z-slice images and run the necessary segmentation and analyzation of the data. Along with this we were given a talk by Antonios about designing Oligo probes, featuring the software ‘OASIS’ that he developed! On Tuesday I finished my script to batch-process my data and began running it. Along with this, we got to the lab early to meet with Tae about her PHD work with UCE’s (ultra-conserved-elements), which she graciously agreed to, even though she’s currently 13 hours ahead in Korea and it was late night for her! Because the analysis I ran was so in-depth, it took a couple of days to run, so on Wednesday, I focused on my presentation while my script continued to run. Along with this, Sarah Belanger, a fellow Pintern at Brown, took a train and visited the lab! She hung out, gave a presentation about her work, and got to see what our lab is all about! Wednesday we were also given two lectures! The first was from Eunice about her PHD work with translocated UCE’s and one translocation in specific which causes a form of Leukemia. Then in the afternoon Julia gave us a talk on her honors thesis work with RNA sequencing the invasive European Green Crab! By the end of the day, I’d learned so much, and my script finally finished running so I had all of my completed data! This meant that on Thursday morning I was able to make some plots using python and my data, which I placed into my presentation for that afternoon! Thursday afternoon, we gave our presentations. It was so great to get the feel of giving a high-level scientific presentation. One in which everyone converses about the findings and we all make conclusions and examine the data (which led to the presentation being about an hour and a half)! And after we finished, we were presented with wonderful ‘certificates of completion’ put together by Ting and Meira! (I most definitely got emotional as soon as they were given to us).
After this packed week of coding, analyzation, and so much learning, it came to an end with the final day! Friday was a wonderful way to say goodbye to the lab (and it was also my 17th birthday)!! Because of that, we had a lab lunch together and I brought in a blueberry lemon cake I made for us the night before. We said our goodbyes and had some great conversation, along with completing some off-boarding things in order to leave the lab. The day was topped off with a Genetics Social Hour that our lab was hosting that week, complete with some basil lemonade we made using basil from our garden!! Afterwards, we sat in our lunch room just talking and saying our goodbyes for about two hours (I couldn’t get myself to walk out the door). Eventually though, I made it home, packed up my belongings, and my internship officially came to an end. I can’t even put in to words how incredibly grateful and lucky I am to have been given this wonderful opportunity and experience. I will never forget all that I have learned and each and every one of the people who made my time here in Boston so comfortable, enlightening, and wonderful. All that never would have been possible without the Pinhead Institute and the incredible people of the Ting Wu lab. From the bottom of my heart thank you!
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