Hughes Mentor:  Ruth Collins

Department: Vet Molecular Medicine

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A Hughes Scholar Guide to Doing Research in the Collins’ Lab

Located on the fourth floor of the Veterinary Medical Center or the VTR, Dr. Ruth Collins’ lab is a place where you will find loud music, singing people and half sane graduate students. Just kidding. Well, there are sometimes loud music, screaming and singing people, and occasionally graduate students going bit insane, but I guess it is not that different than any other research lab on Cornell campus. Like most labs, talking to yourself out loud is accepted as normal here. I can’t think of another lab I would rather be part of. I joined the Collins’ lab in the fall of last year because I was interested in their research topic and I liked the atmosphere of the lab. We work to understand the signaling pathways involved in the process of polarized exocytosis. More specifically the current research projects revolve around the Rab GTPase protein Sec4 regulated vesicle trafficking pathway. Using genetics, molecular and biochemical approaches, the group studies the pathway using yeast as model organism to identify novel proteins involved in the process of polarized exocytosis.

During this summer, I was working on two separate projects. The first one was a continuation of the work I had started during the academic year, and the second one was a new project. On both of these projects, a graduate student supervised me. As I became more comfortable with the lab and my projects, I became more independent. But there was always someone there to ask when I was stuck and needed help. My first project involved mating and genotyping yeast. This project, which is still going on, is to create yeast strain containing knockout of six different genes that encode for a six-subunit protein complex. The strain will later be used to insert tagged versions of the knockout genes to observe, possibly, complex formation. I would cross one knockout strain with another to get a double knockout and cross that double with another two get the triple. After a certain cross, I would let the diploid cells sporolate in special media and dissect the tetrads into four haploid cells. Then the haploid cells are plated or frogged onto selection plates, which allowed me to genotype them. To check for the gene knockout however, I used PCR. Thanks to this project, I found out that I really don’t like dissecting tiny tetrads on microscope using tiny needles. The part I liked about this project, well obviously, was getting results and creating a new strain of yeast. I also added a new word to my vocabulary this summer: sextuple knockout.

The second project was creating yeast/human chimera protein and testing its function. The goal of the project was to determine whether or not Elp1p, which regulates exocytosis in yeast, does the same thing in humans by analyzing its human homolog gene called IKAP. So I constructed part yeast and part human DNA construct and cloned it into a vector. I analyzed its expression in elp1_ knockout yeast. For this project I did many yeast and bacterial transformations, and streaking transformants onto plates and recording the growth of the cells by taking pictures of the plates each progressive day after streaking. The initial results of this project are very promising and I look forward to continuing my work during the academic year.

I had fun this summer through the Cornell Hughes program. Doing research during the summer is completely different than research during the school year. With no classes, you can be completely involved with your project and things get done, unlike during the semester, when you can only devote so many hours to the lab. And it was a good way for me to really understand what it means to be a scientist. I highly recommend summer research for anyone interested in pursuing career in scientific research. And it also good to remember, when choosing a lab consider both the science and the people. I could imagine it to be hard to enjoy science if you don’t get along with the people you work with everyday for 9 to10 hours.

Professor Ruth Collins

Doctor Collins is an assistant professor working in the Vet Medical Center. She completed her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at Oxford, and then moved to the Imperial Cancer Research Foundation in London where she worked on her Ph.D. She then moved to the United States where she completed her post doctoral work at Yale, and after discovering the joys of research in the U.S., decided to stay. So she came to Cornell where she has conducted research for the past five years.

This professor considers the lab an oasis that nurtures free thought and active problem solving; for, in the lab we must figure things out for ourselves because there is nobody there to tell us how or what to think. It’s an atmosphere of cutting edge applied independent thought.

Professor Collins openly admits her great expectation of undergrads, but has first handedly seen the benefits of thought, focus, and hard work. If an undergrad is to research in her lab, she expects a commitment to the lab so the student can first learn the methods then begin to intelligently incorporate his or her own thoughts into the experiment. Because of the rather comprehensive focus of this lab, there are several varying techniques applying knowledge of disciplines including cell biology, genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology. Thus, this is not a good lab for a student simply trying to pull off a short stint of research with the hopes of obtaining a letter of recommendation. However, a good letter of recommendation may be an added bonus to a full and intelligent commitment to research in this lab.

In a broad sense, Professor Collins and her associates are working toward the identification of proteins that may be involved in cell growth. One focus is on the proteins involved in the movement of vesicles that transport other proteins to various places within the cell. One of the important protein families involved in this process is the Rab proteins. The lab is trying to get a better understanding of Rab protein activation and the general results of this activation such as how activation coordinates with other cellular events, and what happens when the protein is inappropriately activated. More specifically, a major concentration is on the mechanism by which Rab proteins are recruited onto subcellular membranes. Currently, the complete mechanism of Rab protein recruitment is not entirely known, but the lab has recently discovered a protein in yeast, Yip1p, which seems to play a role in the recruitment process. Furthermore, the lab has identified Yip1p-related proteins in both mice and humans, so the next step is to address the hypothesis that Rab membrane recruitment in both yeast and mammalian cells employs similar mechanisms.