A Spicy Finale to my TRIP! by Charlotte Tan

We’ve finally finished our 10 days in the lab, and time really flew by! This entire experience has shown me that the lab is a place that I truly enjoy working in. I’ve grown so close to my TRIP friends in both Session A and Session B (benefits of coming into the lab at 11AM every day!) and this experience has been one that I will cherish forever. ​

As mentioned in my previous blog, in my independent experiment, I explored how spice and pickle juice impacted gut and overall health. When I first pitched my experiment, I mentioned that I wanted to perform 3 different assays to investigate these systems, including the negative geotaxis assay to measure fly activity levels, the smurf assay to measure gut permeability, and the microbiome assay to measure the diversity of gut bacteria.

Even after spending 6 hours in the lab, I still had to rush to finish all my assays on time. It was definitely shocking when I realized how inaccurate my original time estimates were, especially after we ran out of CO2 in the lab and were forced to sort our flies on ice. Still, I’ve found myself enjoying the methodic routine of performing one assay after another, examining over 100 flies under the microscope to analyze their gut lining, and making many microcentrifuge tubes full of crushed fly gut solutions (I promise the process isn’t as gross as it sounds). Even the data analysis has been interesting despite my admittedly impatient nature.

When I first went into the TRIP lab, I never expected myself to fall in love with science even more.

When I first went into the TRIP lab, I never expected myself to fall in love with science even more. This journey has provided far more than simply “research experience”. I’ve learned how to perform assays efficiently, strengthened my collaboration skills, and I feel like we’ve built a community that will last far beyond these 5 weeks. I’ve even reached some conclusions in my independent project, like how extreme spice does damage the gut lining, but pickle juice can reduce the severity of this effect! Needless to say, all of this could not have happened without Dr. Leystra, our TA Diya, and all of my new friends at TRIP. Even though we’ve reached the end of this “TRIP”, I can’t wait to see what future journeys we all have ahead of us!