Summer 2020 Remote Research
During the semester, I was part of Dr. Agris’s Lab and worked on a project focused on studying the role of the Cdkal1 gene, which encodes a tRNA-methylthiotransferase enzyme. In pancreatic β-cells, this enzyme catalyzes the addition of a methylthio group on adenosine-37 of tRNALys3 and without this modification, tRNALys3 becomes inefficient during translation and the frequency of mutations increases, which may be preventing mature insulin from forming correctly. Over the summer, I was able to use the funds from the URS Summer Project Grant to access new articles, as well as purchase programs to draw schemes and figures to better visualize the ideas related to my project. The past summer was also a great opportunity for me to read more about other methods researchers have used to study the process of insulin translation and the genes involved. While learning about what questions they were asking, how they set up their experiments, and what they found from those experiments, I was also able to improve my writing skills by organizing what I had learned into a literature review. I think that becoming more familiar with the history of related research, methods, and results that have been published, was an important step in gaining a much better understanding of the broader picture for studying the genetics behind Type 2 Diabetes, as well as the future challenges involved in my research, which I hope to continue next semester.
