Over the past summer, I volunteered full-time in Dr. Maria Ariza’s lab at OSU studying the effects of herpesvirus dUTPases in humans. During that time, I learned important generally applicable procedures, including the process of culturing immortalized adherent cells, photographing those cells with fluorescent microscopy, and performing analysis on those images. I also spent time searching the literature to learn the functions of numerous upregulated and downregulated genes in human cells treated with dUTPase.

I’ve had an interest in science research ever since I can remember, expressed in my Kindergarten bio quote that I wanted to be a “mad scientist” when I grew up. In high school, I participated in science research and worked on two different projects over my two years in the course. These projects were completed in groups of two or three students, and they were completely student-led and devised and had to fit in a $250 budget. I remember the excitement I had in this course when conducting a project to study the effect of salinity on conjugation between bacteria cells. Unfortunately, that excitement was somewhat extinguished after several months when there was contamination between our bacterial samples, rendering our results unusable in regard to our hypothesis.

At that time, I had a great interest in research, and the main education I relied on in my project was from biology classes, but I lacked the technical knowledge and skills crucial to wet lab research. After we discovered the contamination, we investigated what we did wrong and learned that despite our wearing masks and gloves and using only new tools on the petri dishes, we were not operating under aseptic technique. When I investigated, I discovered that proper aseptic technique would likely require the use of extremely costly equipment unavailable to me in High School, such as a Biosafety Cabinet and Autoclave. In coming to Ohio State and getting involved with research, I was glad to learn the details of proper aseptic technique and have the facilities necessary to prevent contamination. I learned to be very consciousness of what I touched, when my hands or tools moved out of the Biosafety Cabinet, and of my intricate movements with pipettes, ensuring I didn’t scratch parts of a plate or flask or touch the outside of containers. I look back now at my High School research days and smile in amusement at how comparatively untidy my research techniques were compared to what I do now.

I recall one specific time over the summer when I had just begun growing the cells I had been assigned after thawing them from liquid nitrogen. I had already successfully passed them once. This means they had grown until they were highly confluent in a flask, and then I used various chemicals and media to remove them from the flask, count them, resuspend them, and add some of them back to the cleaned flask. These cells were kept in a small flask without air vents in the cap, so I had to unscrew the cap while they were incubating for proper exchange of CO₂ and O₂. While taking them out of the incubator one time, I forgot to re-screw the cap, and it fell off onto the ground as I took the flask out. I quickly put the flask back in the incubator and asked my graduate student mentor if I could just replace the cap with a new, sterile one. I sadly learned that I couldn’t since the cells had been exposed to the air and could have been contaminated. This experience helped cement the importance of being extremely particular in aseptic technique, especially when culturing cells. Thankfully, there was another aliquot of the cells in another flask that another member of the lab was able to split into a new flask.

Later in the summer, I was starting to gain more independence in the tissue culture hood after shadowing and taking turns with my graduate student mentor. One week, she gave me the protocol and some related information about thawing, culturing, and passing cells. She asked me to study it at home so I could be proficient at it in the lab. After verbally running through each step and the important details from memory, my mentor corrected any small errors or omissions I made. Then, she watched as I completed the protocol, carefully proceeding from step to step in the process of passing the cells. This was a somewhat nerve-racking task, trying to prevent any shaking in my hands as I carefully pipetted reagents and cells, making sure not to unintentionally touch any surfaces. The daunting nature of this task was compounded by the fact that this procedure needs to be done somewhat quickly, as the chemicals that detach the cells from the flask are also toxic to the cells over time. I quickly checked that the cells were detached under a microscope, and then I carried on with neutralizing and removing them before they were harmed. In the end, my mentor gave me feedback on how I did and highlighted a few small errors I made but overall said that I “passed”. I was very relieved to have passed this test, and it marked a milestone in my growth working in a research lab.

Another important skill I practiced over the summer was searching for research papers and extracting the information I needed from them. I relied on skills I had learned in one of my freshman Biomedical Science courses on searching Biomedical Literature. I leaned on the Embase and PubMed catalogs to search, and cross-referenced genes with their official Gene ID pages from the NIH. I gained a lot of experience using multiple search terms and narrowing my search to specific topics and kinds of publications, eliminating conference abstracts and letters. After finding seemingly relevant papers, I would find where the gene was mentioned, and often it was listed in a batch of hundreds of genes in a “genome-wide association study (GWAS)”, with my gene of interest not elaborated on further. After moving on from these frequent red herrings, I would finally find papers that described the purpose or mechanism of the gene. At first, I would just take the relevant text from those studies and include them in my gene spreadsheet. However, for some of the genes I found multiple papers mentioning different roles, so I synthesized my understanding of the gene’s different roles. One example of this deeper investigation into specific genes was when I was asked to present a PowerPoint about a selected group of up/downregulated genes. I focused on genes with the most literature describing them and put together a presentation explaining how these were related and could affect some specific disease mechanisms. This was another learning moment, as I had to answer questions about these genes from lab members including my PI, and had to admit when I didn’t know. This was a great learning experience, especially as my knowledgeable PI and Co-PI shared information about the topic that helped contextualize it for me.

This first experience in a university research laboratory was a crucial step for me in my journey as a student, learner, and for my professional aspirations. This experience was very personally fulfilling as I got to experience the real research I’ve dreamed about since I was a little kid. I remember having my interest in science research reawakened in 7^thgrade when I learned about the wonders of CRISPR from a YouTube video. Again, I had my interest reaffirmed in high school during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent rollout of revolutionary mRNA vaccines. Getting to work in this virology lab not only fulfilled my personal interests but also taught me many important techniques and details, as well as information about the immune system that I will use going forward. Lastly, I plan to pursue an MD-PhD program after graduating and ultimately wish to work as a physician-scientist in my career. So, this research experience will be crucial for building my skills, both practical skills like aseptic technique and culturing cells, but also skills like searching for and dissecting papers to find relevant information. I am excited to use these skills in my next lab as I continue to learn more and gain more important skills.