My name is Vi Tran and I’m a part of the Fred Hutch Pathways Explorer Program 2024, session 1. During the program, I got to meet new people who were very nice and learned about the Hallmarks of Cancer, immunotherapy, DNA, and CAR-T-cells, which was very interesting and helpful because it allowed me to understand the cause of cancer and how the immune system in our body responds and fights against cancer. Along with that, I also got to work in a lab, which was super fun. I learned how to use a micropipette, make gels for spot tests, and had many lab tours, where I got to explore and talk to researchers at Fred Hutch about their lab.
Picture of me and my lab partner extracting the DNA of strawberries on the first day, we successfully collected the strawberry DNA!!!
One of the labs that impressed me the most was the CML spot test lab, where I got the patient blood sample and we used 2% agarose gel with SYBR to test which patient is positive with CML (Chronic Myeloid Leukemia). First, me and my lab partner rehydrated the blood sample from the patient sample card to get the mixture of patient DNA and rehydration solution. Then we made the 2% agarose gel, put them in the gel box and loaded the DNA ladder, controlled positive and each patient’s sample into the gel. We placed the hood on the gel box, turned on the power and waited around 20-25 minutes to get our results.
This is the result that we got, as we looked at the bands in the picture, it clearly shows that patient sample 6 and patient sample 3 are positive with CML and patient samples 5 and 7 are healthy. I feel like it was very cool to look at the bands on the gel to get the results on whether the patients are positive with CML or not.
We visited many lab tours, and my favorite one is Dr. Parkhurst’s fruit fly lab. Researchers here use a small laser to wound the flies, allowing them to study the flies’ healing processes. I learned that by doing this, they get to understand how our bodies heal and find problems that might cause diseases like cancer because fruit flies have similar genes to humans. We also got a fun competition, where we compete with each other to see who’s the fastest to identify 20 of the female and 20 of the male fruits flies correctly, which sounds easy but also really challenging because they’re really small and I have to focus my eye on the microscope. I learned that the male fruit flies would have a black color at the end of their tail, which the female fruit flies do not have. In the end, I won the competition by correctly identifying all the female and male fruit flies within 2-3 minutes.
These are fruit flies that are alive and being fed by the researchers.
All researchers in Fred Hutch that I met during lab tours were all really nice and welcomed when I came to their lab. They answered all of my questions about their research and let me take pictures and walk around the lab to explore. As I walked to Fred Hutch everyday, it really made me feel welcomed and encouraged me to learn new things. Moreover, I made many new friends and got to work with them. We love to play “Mafia” together during break time, which was very fun. I’m grateful for the experience I had with the Fred Hutch Pathways Explorers Program and for all the people that I met!!!
Picture of us on the last day in the lab.
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