Week 3

This week on the clinical side, I had an interesting experience shadowing Dr. Vielemeyer, who is an infectious disease and travel medicine specialist.  I was quite surprised at the fact that the majority of the patients we saw had non-communicable infections arising from surgical implant procedures (such as hip replacement, stent insertion).  Due to their material properties, implant surfaces often act as anchor sites for bacteria and fungi to adhere, which can subsequently cause problematic infections to develop at the implantation site.  To make matters worse, infections contracted in a hospital setting are often times highly drug resistant and difficult to treat.  This is clearly an unmet clinical need that can be addressed by biomedical engineers through the development of novel antimicrobial biomaterials. 

Research wise, I am continuing to make progress on the Plasmodium falciparum project.  I started my third batch of parasite cultures early in the week and performed DNA and RNA extraction on my culture from last week.  Using extracted genomic DNA, we are continuing to test the primers we designed for amplification of beta subunits 1, 2, 3, and 5 of the proteasome.  Amplified products are sent in for Sanger sequencing to allow for genomic comparisons between wild type and drug resistant strains of falciparum parasites.  In beta subunit 1, we identified a missense mutation in the resistant strain genome, which is quite exciting.  More work is definitely required to elucidate the impact of this amino acid change.  Later in the week I had the chance to learn about a flow cytometry method for analyzing percentage of parasite infected red blood cells.