The Research Project

So Cortni and I experienced many problems with our final research project. We came up with a cool idea: Yay lets treat some HIV in pregnant mice and see if it prevents the infection of their babies!!! Only to find out that we can't do that. The humanized mice can have babies but in order to activate the human immune system in the pups, you have to treat them separately after birth aka we can't test the transmission of HIV during pregnancy. Oh boy. So then we kept it simple, treat humanized mice with siRNAs encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles. There its done. And then of course, I find a fairly recent paper that used the same treatment, just in vitro. Well this sucks, our study isn't novel. So here we are, the Saturday before the presentation back to the drawing board, trying to think of new things while trying not to panic.

Thankfully we came up with another idea, our current one, that had not been done before and were able to make progress from there. We met up, finished our powerpoint, practiced it, and turned it in super early, hoping that we'd go first. So thankfully we did end up going first because then we got our presentation and nerves over with early without having to feel intimidated after watching everyone else's great presentations. Presenting this time was much better than presenting journal club. Having a partner in crime gave me some peace of mind. If I wasn't sure of something, my partner was there to help. With Attisa's advice in mind, I think we killed it.