Hughes Mentor:  David Lin

Department: Vet Biomedical Sciences

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A Day in the Life of an Undergraduate in the Lab

Around the end of freshman year I made the decision that I wanted to have some research experience at Cornell. I was thoroughly interested in the nervous system so I decided that I wanted to do research relevant to neurobiology. I joined Helene Porte’s sleep lab at the beginning of my sophomore year and worked there throughout the spring. However, after working with her group for a while I realized that my passion didn’t lie in cognitive psychology and that I wanted to approach neuroscience from a molecular standpoint. I went through the office of undergraduate biology’s faculty list and did extensive research into professors with whom I wanted to work. I came across Dr. Lin’s description and I felt that his line of research was well fitted for my interests. He described his lab as taking a genetic and genomic approach to axon guidance and neuronal development in the mouse olfactory system. On top of that, he was also the founder and former director of the microarray core, which sounded very promising in terms of techniques and methodologies with which I’d be working. I emailed Dr. Lin and he felt that I would be a good candidate for his lab. I joined his group towards the beginning of my junior year.

I entered into the lab and I was immediately given a mouse to characterize. This particular line overexpresses cytoplasmic serine hydroxy methyltransferase (cSHMT), which is an enzyme involved in one-carbon folate metabolism. However, before I could even begin working on my project I needed to learn the relevant techniques. I was assigned to work with a post-doc who was characterizing the cSHMT knockout mouse. Since I started work during classes it was difficult to get much done. The main technique used by this lab is in-situ hybridization and the first step to performing this type of experiment is to synthesize an RNA probe. This is a process that can be completed within 2 days, yet there are long series of incubations. During the semester, it took me about a month before getting my first set of probes and then another month to get the actual experiment to work. With school and the lack of any experience with a micropipette, it was difficult to put in enough time to finish anything substantial. I did however learn all of the relevant background to the lab and to my particular project so I would have the right direction when I finally started working with my own mouse.

By spring semester I was able enough to help the post-doc with characterization of his mouse. I spent a lot of time trying to find out where cSHMT was naturally expressed in the olfactory epithelium. I did double fluorescent in-situ hybridizations in an effort to co-localize cSHMT with expression of other markers that delineate known cell types. These experiments didn’t work well since this gene has a very low level of expression and our assay wasn’t quite sensitive enough to pick it up. Around this time I also began crossing my mice in order to start working on my own project. This opened my eyes to an entire different aspect of research in this lab of which I was previously unaware. In a few weeks my mice had literally exploded. Where there were once 4 mice in a cage there were about 50; I then learned about the joys of genotyping. Tailing, extracting DNA, setting up hundreds of PCR reactions, and then running them all on gels consumed my entire being. At the end of the year, with my mice all straightened out and breeding colonies finally established, I was ready to set up the crosses that would one day yield samples for my experiments.

During the summer, I spent the entire first part of the month with double fluorescent in-situs to look for an allelic exclusion phenotype in the knock-out mouse. Then my mice started popping out babies again and I became even more familiar with genotyping. I was working with pretty horrible Mendelian ratios so I didn’t expect too many workable samples. However, luck was on my side and I had at least one mutant-wildtype comparison in almost every litter. Then the tides turned; the cryostat, which is a machine absolutely essential for my experiments, decided to break down over the course of a month and to this day isn’t yet fixed. Just a few days ago another lab was generous enough to let me use their personal cryostat and I’m finally beginning to collect my first set of data.

Overall, research has been a great experience. I’m incredibly interested in my work and I’ve met a lot of intelligent, friendly people. Initially, I was testing the waters of biological research in order to see if I could really find myself as a career scientist. After delving fairly deep into the scientific method, I’ve come to the realization that I do want to go into a research career and I would recommend an undergraduate research experience to anyone who has similar interests.