Parent’s Weekend is here!
After a summer of hard work, Williams Lab is excited and ready to present results to parent’s and alumni at the Parents and Alumni weekend poster session.
Three of us, Alex, Maddie and Quang turned in our posters on Tuesday, and all of it looks great and ready to be displayed on Friday.
Alex, Larissa, Quang, and Maddie at the poster presentation
The week, however, continues as usual. Jacob gave a great Journal Club presentation about the enzymatic activity of Glutathione T-Transferases at different stages of zebrafish development. The paper provides a lot of basic background on the role that glutathione plays at different stages of development responding to changes in the surrounding environment which then informs the process of how the organism responds to such changes when Nrf1a/b and Nrf2a/b is knocked down.
In addition, over the past month, I (Quang) was introduced to the fish colony and is now taking care of the fish! I am currently “in charge” of the AB3 strain, and have already identified a potential favorite fish that I will undoubtedly get attached to. It is great to be more helpful around the lab.
With regards to my own projects, I am currently finishing up the bioinformatics analysis. Using a 2-factor ANOVA, I extract lists of genes that are strain and interaction significant and do rank product comparisons using that gene list. So far, the biological conditions that showed up are similar to that of the single time point analysis that was done during the summer. After wrapping up, the next step would be some hands on lab work to identify the role of certain genes regulated by Nfe2 that is part of hemoglobin generation. It is very exciting to finally do some wet lab!
Alex and Maddie are also making headway in their own projects as well. Alex managed to improve drastically the ChIP protocol and designed a very effective positive control. Maddie got more images from her fishes and will now start imaging samples from the new strain of fish she is breeding. In addition, she submitted an abstract to present her poster in Baltimore at the annual Society of Toxicology Meeting in 2017! Best of luck to Maddie!