The Finish Line by Diego Asencio

After a bittersweet last day in the lab, my TRIP experience is near over. All the train rides, homework, calculations, and flies are behind me. However, all the knowledge that I have gained and relationships that I have made will never be lost. After the first week, where keeping on top of the homework was not my strong suit, I never thought that I would be able to finish anything in the intensive lab, but with the help of Dr. Leystra and Dr. Purdy, my experiment was a success! Let's take a look into exactly what was a success, what wasn’t, and how I learned from the amazing experience in the TRIP Lab.

My experiment was set up to answer the question, does omeprazole have any long term side effects? I take omeprazole to help treat my Eosinophilic Esophagitis, so I wanted to make sure that there wouldn't be any major unknown side effects. The Larval Locomotion with Methyl Blue assay was the perfect experiment to use to answer my question. How it works is on a 10 cm x 15 cm strip of thermal paper, I spread out five larvae and painted them with a 0.2% methyl blue dilution. The larvae would leave a trail on the paper showing exactly where they went over a 10 minute period. I then used a software to measure out the distance and used the average distance traveled per condition to determine whether or not the larvae were healthy. I used a control condition, and then by using 2 solutions, I made the equivalent to 20 mg, 40 mg, 80 mg, and 120 mg of omeprazole for flies and put it into their food. The question was successful overall, and depending on how you look at it not so good news - The higher the dose the larvae were given, the less average distance they traveled.

Now, it wouldn’t be a teenager in a university lab without a few mistakes here and there. At first, I wanted to test the lifespan of the fly, but there would not be enough time to conduct the assay in the lab. This was the ultimate goal, as I wanted to make sure that my lifespan would not be affected by this drug, but I was unfortunately never able to test the lifespan. Furthermore, after picking the Larval Locomotion with methyl blue, I wanted to not only measure the distance, but also the amount of turns and how fast the larvae were moving. But the turns seemed to be completely random, and the speed was impossible to measure unless I recorded all 10 minutes of the larvae and tried to estimate the speed. On top of these mistakes, on my second rep I forgot to make a control vial, so now I am completely aware about the dangers of sharing control conditions between different reps, and then I forgot to take flies home with me to conduct the assay at home for rep 5. So all in all, being naive was an incredibly obvious thing to not do, but I fell for the trap of biting off more than I could chew.

And so now, at the end of it all, what have I learned? To be honest, I will have to see what I learned when I get thrown into another lab experience. Testing my skills such as pipetting, calculations, communications, and clarity, are all going to be important, and that's not to mention getting to the lab on time, having all my work done for the day, finding time to eat and drink, which are all just as important. But there is no doubt in my mind that TRIP has better prepared me for any science lab that I will see in the future. If I could say one thing to my week one self, I would tell him to put his head down and get to work, because TRIP is not a cakewalk.