Research...
Now my research has come to a stage where - I have to squeeze out all my brain juice just to form the next hypothesis.It is pretty clear what the next steps are going to be, and we are pretty positive that we will be able to see a phenotype after we get our assay running and the knock-outs coming in. What phenotype though - that is the thing that I completely cannot predict.
Established literature doesn't seem to help much - accept for an experiment someone did as a control but they didn't make any story out of that. I know what those proteins I am studying are used for in various circumstances, but I just can't fit those functions into our experimental system, given the new model that a new PI in Hopkins recently established - and his data is convincing.
He came over to Hopkins from UCSF recently - when I went to listen to him on Friday I was pretty amazed by his presentation actually (we are using his protocol(s) already, and I used that chance to make myself known to him). What is more amazing is, I saw a familiar name in the presentation...! When I downloaded the paper today, I went to google that name and attempted to find out if she is actually THAT person that I know.
And indeed so. The HCJC Student Council President when I was in J1 is listed as one of the authors. She didn't even go to UCSF for college, but apparently she decided to go there for an internship after she graduated. Now the post-doc she used to work with works as a PI next to us.
Read the interview of Bianca by the SMA here to get an idea of what I am talking about:
http://news.sma.org.sg/3910/Interview.pdf
This is the paper.
AJ Ewald, et al., "Collective Epithelial Migration and Cell Rearrangements Drive Mammary Branching Morphogenesis", Dev. Cell 14, 570 - 581 (Apr 2008)
