Week 1 - Emily

This week was an exercise in determination. Monday: Orientation meeting and then phone calls all around- every doctor in this place seems to be cocooned within multiple layers of secretaries, requiring strategic navigation in order to excise 15 minutes of time out of their life-saving schedules. However, success was shortly achieved. I found my mentor’s lab, despite the fact that it was 2 whole blocks away- scary- and that food trucks from every nation and tongue besieged my hungry olfactory receptors along the way. Can olfactory receptors be hungry?
Ok. Lyden’s lab is pretty cool. They’re on the front edge of a lot of cancer mechanisms including the epithelial to mesenchymal transition within the context of metastasis and these little microparticles called exosomes that are like mysterious packages sent out by the tumor to deliver coded messages to various organ systems. I like anthropomorphizing my science. Exsomes are like the “Book Left on Park Bench” of the tumor-spy world. Or perhaps more appropriately, they’re like those thick shrouded bags with heavy zippers labeled “STATE” that burly men wearing leather jackets carry on to international airplanes because they can’t be checked plane-side. Which tells you nothing about their biological purpose or mechanism. Right. More on that later.

Tuesday: Lab in the morning. Met with my postdoc mentor for awhile to discuss project options, since Lyden has been in Sweden this week. He was very helpful in that he was as much interested in my biomechanics expertise as I was in his cellular mechanisms insight. We could be quite the dream team once we learn to speak each other’s language. He asked me to help him out with his lab meeting presentation, because he had to talk about lung stiffness changes (scary Young’s Modulus!), but then that got cancelled.
I spent the afternoon waiting for Dr Chen, the youngest pediatric cardiac surgeon in it seems like (that’s probably a slight exaggeration), but ultimately he got tied up in a case and his secretary re-scheduled me for Wed morning.

Wednesday: Met with Dr Chen in the morning, which was great. We talked about the collaboration between our labs, in which he sends pediatric valve tissue from his surgeries up to Ithaca and we characterize it mechanically, cellularly, and pathologically. We also use the cells for our in vitro experiments. This was a good day in the lab, since I learned to do mouse tail vein injections. My previous work with mice helped, as did a visiting high schooler’s running commentary, “AH! Is he uncomfortable? YOU’RE SQUISHING HIM!” (she’s in the lab for the summer). The joys of animal research. However, what mattered was that I managed not to inflict a pulmonary embolism on any of the little guys, which ensured their safety as well as mine, considering that my postdoc mentored had clearly delineated the following causal pathway: mouse death = end of experiment = my death. Just kidding. I think.

Thursday: Ethics seminar in the morning, which I loved despite the fact that it was the same case studies from both the CITI training and the NSF webinar. Our lecturer did an excellent job engaging the class on multiple levels, even when posed the most ridiculous scenarios: “Well, what if 5 people are starving in a lifeboat? Are you justified in killing one to save the other four?” Her patience and continual insight was nothing less than Herculean. *Blog Clap* I was in the lab for the afternoon, learning to use the cryostat sectioning machine – pretty sure I only nearly averted death-by-postdoc in that endeavour, as well – watching a mouse femoral bone marrow injection, and doing blood content analysis to determine if some cancerous mice were anemic or not. Apparently, anemia is a common confounding factor in mouse lung cancer models. Their blood-oxygen levels go down, suggesting compromised pulmonary function, but the real culprit is lack of O2 transporting hemoglobin in the blood. Understanding the interactions of the two pathologies can help in interpreting the massively complex in vivo results down the line.

Friday: Lab all day, learning mouse techniques, helping an undergrad with RNA isolation, and meeting with Lyden. Project to be on EMT in pre-metastatic niche.