Spring 2013 URSP Participant Mariam Hashemi:
I have been
working with the Beatty and Guy Liver Research Department for a little over a
year now. Majority of the research being done in this lab revolves around Non
Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD), Hepatitis B, and obesity. I began by
shadowing a PhD student and gradually worked my way up the ladder and landed
myself a project of my own; granted the project I am currently working on is a
subsection of my mentor’s project, I am still running everything on my own! I
began by talking to Dr. Aybike Birerdinc and Dr. Ancha Baranova, they have
helped me out from day one by providing me with advice and project ideas
throughout the year.
Obesity
is becoming a major issue in the United States and the project I am currently
working on is focused on finding specific gene expressions from the KCTD family
of proteins and its relation to obesity. My mentor had conducted a project that
showed a specific protein from the KCTD family is present in patients that are
morbidly obese and have been diagnosed with NAFLD. This project will not only help me, but it
will also help physicians, and other researchers in their long-term goals of
fighting obesity.
On
a weekly basis, I am generally reading literature or background information
about KCTD and NAFLD. However, if there are specific experiments going on in
the lab, I go in and watch to get a better understanding of how my project will
be completed. Once I’ve created a list of genes I want to observe, I create
primers and wait for them to come in. Once they arrive I will be able to
validate the primers and run a qPCR test using samples and find some sort of
correlation between the samples used and the gene expression. This week I
discovered I can create a brand new primer from scratch, if I needed to do so.
I
am currently a pre-med student at George Mason University and I’m striving to
become a Physician. This project can be taken into so many different levels of
science and help a lot of individuals who are suffering from NAFLD, which does
not have a cure. As I move on in my educational career, I am hoping this
project will open more doors for the obesity epidemic we are currently facing.
