Capital Region Cancer Research Symposium 2014:

 New Strategies and technologies in Cancer Reasearch

        Today instead of the usual lab work and lab readings, we headed over to the cancer research symposium held at the Hilton inn at Albany Medical center. The purpose of the symposium is to promote cancer research interactions among differnt Albany facilities. There I sat and listened to the different cancer research project all across the capital district. Projects came from SUNY-Albany, RPI, Albany medical center, Albany college of Pharmacy and many more.
        One particular presentation that i found very interesting was "Collective Rotation of Epithelial Cells Exhibits Left-Right Asymmetry in a 3D system," given by Amanda Chin, a graduate student at RPI. Basically she concluded that left-right symmetry in a cell is vital for normal tissue growth. She concluded that inherent cellular chirality (left-right asymmetry) could be a force that moves cells during tissue morphogenesis, and the development of tumors.
        I left a little earlier, the symposium was held until 4:00pm and I left at 11:00am. However I was still able to observe the impressive researches that are happening in our community right now and I got to experience a science symposium, which I had never been to before this.

   

November 7, 2014

Lab meeting

Today during my internship, most of the time was spent in lab meeting; where we went through a paper that was meant to be read the day before. It was quite confusing for me to follow, but after my mentor and I sat down to speak about it, I began to understand the article a lot more. Primarily the article was about the changing of DNA sequence will change the overall function of that DNA, and this can cause "intellectual disabiliy disorder."

Article: NSun2-Mediated Cytosine-5 Methylation of Vault Noncoding RNA Determines Its Processing into Regulatory Small RNAs

Cell Movies

After the lab meeting, my mentor and I talked about the cell movies, where we looked at the movment of previously cultured breast cancer cells. In the control, we can see that the movement of the cells is not as rapid and agressive as the other cells. Below are movie links to comapare two different cell movements due to different RNA concentrations. 

cell movie: control

cell movie