Livia, Berjana, and Ellie presented posters on their summer research at Trinity’s 10th Annual Science Summer Research Symposium today.

Berjana succeeded in our first attempt to do Dictyostelium development on filters in the lab. Right now we are just playing with the development, but eventually we hope to study signaling during development.

Fruiting bodies from our experiment. Picture courtesy of James Graydon.

The lab participated in the annual Field Day games for summer researchers. Prof. Kovarik, Livia, and Berjana were on team ChemFatale with Lauren Davidson and Niru Pokharel from the Curran Lab. Ellie competed on a team with her roommates. Select pictures are below, and many more are on the Chemistry Department’s Facebook page, courtesy of Prof. Curran.

The first game on learning and memory involved running around in a hula hoop…

We think Ellie’s team probably beat us at this hula hoop game…

Berjana on the pipette tip racking relay.

In honor of environmental science, we did a “water conservation” game passing sponges of water over our heads to a bucket…

Team ChemFatale post-games. (We came in last, but with lots of style.)

This weekend I finally had a chance (and all the parts I needed) to align the Obis 488LS laser for our LIF detector. Experiments will start later this week!

Today was the 27th annual Trinity College Science Symposium. Lorena, Livia, and Ellie presented their posters to the Trinity Community.

The last paper to be published from my postdoctoral work in the Allbritton lab was named a “hot” article in Integrative Biology. The paper “Response of single leukemic cells to peptidase inhibitor therapy across time and dose using a microfluidic device” reports on our longitudinal, single-cell analysis of leukemia cells treated with a chemotherapeutic drug for several months. Access will be free for 4 weeks through the journal’s blog.

This weekend, Lorena, Livia, and Ellie presented posters on their work at the undergraduate symposium of the Connecticut Valley Section of the American Chemical Society, held at UMass-Amherst. Lorena also accepted the CVS graduating senior award for biochemistry at Trinity.

Lorena presents her senior thesis work on loading peptides into Dictyostelium discoideum.

Ellie presents her working on constructing a system for microchip electrophoresis with laser-induced fluorescence.

Livia describes her research on supported bilayer membrane coatings.

The group after the award ceremony.

Click through (or see below) for pictures and updates on research in the lab this semester!

Lorena is collecting data for her senior thesis on loading reporter peptides in Dicty. She’s making good use of our new epifluorescence microscope.

Livia is analyzing electroosmotic flow data using the conductivity method. We are now coating chips with supported lipid bilayers.

Ellie is helping to build the microchip electrophoresis-LIF system. Here she is soldering platinum electrodes onto the leads for our high voltage power supply.

Equipment has arrived, and research is underway in the lab. Lorena is culturing Dictyostelium and has begun looking at peptide loading into the cells. Livia is working on LabView coding and learning microfabrication. Pictures coming soon!