Day 6: Beginning of Research

Today was a day of firsts: first train ride from Pforzheim, first high speed train ride to Mannheim, first time taking a tram, first day of research, first time performing a western blot, first time hearing German and Chinese adults singing along to Adele's song Rolling in the Deep in English :), first time developing an x-ray, first time seeing two Americans in Germany, and the first time of trying caramel gelato.  This has been a busy day and I'm exhausted, but I've also learned a lot.  I had to get up this morning at 6 to make it to train station and catch the train at 7:30, from their we headed to Mannheim, which is a huge city in Germany.  When we got to the German Cancer Research Center we were paired with our mentors and headed off the the lab.  In my lab, we are working with a protein called ARVCF, which is important in cell to cell signalling and is also found in the cytoplasm and nucleus.  We are trying to discover the other functions of this protein because they have found it to be overexpressed in tumors.  Learning more about this protein could help us to understand cancer better.  My job for the next few weeks is to separate out proteins from a cell and perform fractionation on them to separate them out in different densities and gather the data on an SDS-page.  The page then is made to undergo electrophoresis to separate the proteins into different sizes.  After that, we perform an immunoblot on them, which detects the specific proteins not just the size.  Today, we finished this part of the experiment for my supervising scientist, Ulkine who is working on her PHD.  We added antibody to the membrane, which are substrate specific to certain proteins and then we added a second antibody that binds to the first antibody because this second one is linked to a Horseradish Peroxidase enzyme, which produces fluorescence in the ECL solution (used to activate the enzyme).  I know that may sound extremely long and possibly confusing, but it was actually a lot of fun today and the people at the center are really nice.  My favorite part of the day was when three German scientists, two Chinese scientists, and me started singing along to Rolling in the Deep in English, while working.  It's amazing how all of these different nationalities and languages can come together through music :) After research was over, we left the center and made our way back stopping to get some gelato from a store by the train station.  It only cost one Euro, which I found really cheap.  I feel like that is going to be our regular stop after research each day.  I think I'm going to go sleep now :)
Night :)
~Kiersten