Friday, April 15, 2016

Week Nine: A Biomedical Approach

Hello everyone!!

So this week, I caught a cold (somehow, in this heat??) so I spent most of this week sitting in bed and reading scientific journals and sneezing. It's a good thing I got to do this though because it is really important to do a literature review and I'm also getting back on track with my initial SRP proposal. Along with my research on MALDI in civil engineering, I wanted focus more on current research in the biomedical field, since that's what I want to do in the future.

Out of all the papers I read, I found one particular study very interesting that I had not explored yet. MALDI protein profiling has been successfully applied in the identification of organisms, primarily micro-organisms. The study describes a different sample preparation that I did before; they used broth media growth followed by a protein extraction method before analysis. In this case, MALDI was used to differentiate enteropathogenic (which means it is produced in the intestinal tract) and non-enteropathogenic strains of bacteria.


These tests show RNA knockdown experiments in order to confirm the peptides responsible. These analyses would be extremely beneficial to patients who are suffering from sepsis, a common life-threatening complication due to infection (in order words, blood infection).

Anyway, since I've been under the weather, it was a perfect time to finish painting the set for the living room.. But it's turning out kind of demonic and it's not one of those paintings that scream, "HELLO COME INTO MY LIVING ROOM." You know?


Hah well, thats it for this week.

Seerat Jajj


3 comments:

  1. So interesting to hear another application of Maldi! Congrats on having a productive week despite being sick!

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  2. It sucks that you were sick, but at least you were able to do a literature review. That is also a nice painting.

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  3. Nice job with those results! That first picture reminds me of the spectrometer stuff we used to do AP Chem. Keep it up

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