At the end of the summer, I returned to the Moving Targets Symposium for the second time. The basic format was familiar this year: stand by the poster, explain the project, and adjust the explanation depending on who stopped to listen. It was easier to know what to expect, but explaining the project clearly was […]
2026 Moving Targets Symposium Read More »
This week, I arrived at the senior center with another activity I had prepared. Sometimes it is a new game, a Sudoku page, or a flyer I worked on earlier in the week. Bringing something in and pulling up a chair now feels normal. That is very different from how the project started. The emergency […]
What Months of Weekly Visits Have Shown Me Read More »
After all of the careful plate setup from Week 6, the final question was surprisingly simple: which conditions would actually light up? The co-culture samples were prepared for flow analysis, and the fluorescent readout would show whether the reporter cells responded to the target we had spent the summer building around. One set of results […]
Watching the Right Cells Light Up – Week 7 Read More »
This week was probably the most pipetting I did all summer. A co-culture looks simple once the plate is finished because it is just cells sitting together in wells. Getting every cell type, control, and peptide condition into the correct well was much less simple. A co-culture places two different cell populations together so researchers […]
Setting Up the Co-Culture – Week 6 Read More »
Before writing, you should have the main work from Part 1 in front of you: the selected papers, inclusion and exclusion rules, PRISMA information, notes or a table for every paper, and an organized Zotero library. That preparation matters because a literature review is not a series of book reports. It should not read, “Paper […]
How to Write a Literature Review Part 2: Actually Writing the Review Read More »
Flow cytometry was probably one of the hardest techniques I dealt with this summer. Before I tried it, the basic idea sounded manageable: put cells into a machine, measure their fluorescence, and look at a graph. That description leaves out almost everything that makes the experiment difficult. A flow cytometer moves cells through the instrument […]
Flow Cytometry Is Hard – Week 5 Read More »
For the first three weeks, most of my project involved DNA in tubes and plasmids growing inside bacteria. In Week 4, the work shifted into mammalian cells. We had built and checked the FLT3-TKD D835Y construct. Now we needed cell systems that could express the genetic material and eventually let us test what those cells […]
From Plasmids to Cells – Week 4 Read More »
When I played cognitive games from the podium, only about half of the cafeteria participated. The people who joined brought a lot of energy, but many others stayed quiet. By August, I was less focused on creating one activity for everyone and more focused on how I presented it. The whole-room games worked for seniors […]
Finding Better Ways to Get Seniors Involved Read More »
The sequencing result came back, and Colony 2 was correct. After two weeks of trying to create the FLT3-TKD D835Y mutation and preparing candidate plasmids, we finally had a sequence that matched the construct we intended to make, including the changed DNA at the mutation site. That was the answer we had been waiting for. […]
One Correct Sequence, Then More Bacteria – Week 3 Read More »
The three colonies from Week 1 had grown overnight, so Week 2 started with spinning down those bacterial cultures and extracting the plasmid DNA. I used minipreps for that step. I had done minipreps last summer, so the procedure itself was familiar. What mattered this time was what each tube represented: one candidate version of […]
Designing Primers and Waiting on Sequencing – Week 2 Read More »
