AAAAND ... Where are we at again?
Ph.D candidacy.. here I come!
Sorry to multiple people for not returning calls / msgs / emails for the past couple of months. I promise that I'll try to be a normal human being from now on.
Last Obstacle and Two Major Science Prongs Now On Going
Research ... FINALLY!
To sum up what the committee said during the report: my enzyme RtcB is my current roadblock, as I know. It's less than 10% efficient without cofactors. To go on with, I will be...
1) investigating how E.coli archease (catalytic protein) increases the efficiency of RtcB (my student's project)
2) screening a few additional enzymes that could operate in place of RtcB
3) build gold nanoparticle conjugates and see if they can splice RNA in mammalian cells without the need of an enzyme
Preparations Galore. There's a lot of prep work that needs to go into these experiments before they can be done. I need to design a few plasmids - one for E.coli archease (which we want to screen with RtcB) and one for mutant GFP. I've not worked with mammalian cells before or made gold nanoparticles yet. Kornelia and Kevin can help me with some of that and the rest - literature and Googling is my friend.
Oxford / Emory Research Collaboration
From our discussion, Ms. Harmon and I think the plan has real potential. I'll be creating iterative ideas for research projects for her students this Nov and Dec, and we'll go through them and decide on a couple. Ms. Harmon now knows how to work with E.coli and Oxford has most of the equipment it needs to do very similar work to what I do.
Ms. Harmon is just as excited about this seed project as I am! I'm just bursting to get on top of this. It's so much fun! She's already going to be looking for freshman applicants for me for next summer.
Thus is the current news! Will let you know more updates soon!