Today has been pretty tough, so I don't have a whole lot of time to write a well thought out post. Instead of trying to come up with something, I harassed interviewed my favorite intern Ryan. Here is our Q and A
Me: Hey I'm busy, can you write me a blog post for today.
Ryan: On it!
'Jonathan did no running this week. He ate a lot of brownies at work and then lied about it and said he didn't eat any! Bad Jonathan.'
Me: Thanks . . . What is your favorite song to run too?
Ryan: I usually don't bother running to music
Me: What is your favorite part of working in the lab?
Ryan: Working with you 🙂 , idk working with super expensive, new stuff.
Me: Describe your project for the audience.
Ryan: Ugh, alright. We're seeing how the gut flora (the bacteria in your intestines) changes in morbidly obese patients after they undergo gastric bypass surgery by sequencing the bacteria from before and after the surgery at 6 different time points.
Me: Who taught you everything you know about that?
Ryan: Dr. Buck, Jenny, You, Sujith, and Kim.
This is the point in the interview when our lab manager enlisted Ryan to do something actually productive... there goes the interview.
To elaborate on his project, he is working on extracting DNA from dozens of patients in which he will sequence and analyze the populations of bacteria in intestines. This project is pretty cool, and we are using cutting edge next-generation high throughput sequencing technology to accomplish it. Not many research labs have used this new technology for this, so he has had to spend quite a lot of time designing the experiment and learning about the different regions of bacterial genomes. Not bad for an undergrad!
I hope you enjoyed the interview, and hopefully tomorrow won't be so busy!
That actually looks super interesting. I’d be interested in reading about the findings!
I was going to say almost the same thing! What are the anticipated results? And I guess what purpose would it serve to know?
What we’re hoping to see (based on other researcher’s results) is that there is a change in the bacteria, and that there are certain types of bacteria that disappear and appear as the patients lose weight. It’s unclear right now what is the cause and effect (whether the surgery or losing weight changes the bacteria, or if the bacteria causes the patient to lose weight), and this project may shine some light on that. There is also a lot of other data from these patients that we hope to pool together to get a better sense of why gastric bypass surgery works so well and what the surgery is actually doing to patients at a biochemical level. Basically we do the surgery because we know it improves patient’s health, but we really don’t know what is going on at a molecular level.
That is actually a heck of a lot more interesting than I thought! Thanks, Ryan the Intern!