Week 5

I had the opportunity this week to tour the hospital’s point-of-care and central diagnostic laboratories.  The point-of-care lab contains a variety of portable diagnostic instrumentation to provide timely support for critical care and ER patients.  Some examples include devices for measuring blood gases and biomarkers such as glucose and troponin, which is a highly specific marker for cardiac disorders.  These devices are able to wirelessly upload patient diagnostic data, which are subsequently processed in middleware including RALS and LIS and are then transferred to the Epic electronic health record system all clinicians use.  Unlike the point-of-care lab, the central lab is a much larger facility that takes an assembly line approach to support the majority of the hospital’s diagnostic demands.  The facility is full of automated sample processing instrumentation and additionally has a cool pneumatic tube system in place for receiving patient samples from various locations within the hospital.

In the clinic, the cases I shadowed with Dr. Vielemeyer were generally not as exotic as some of the cases we saw in the previous weeks.  The most interesting case this week was a patient with stage 4 metastatic cancer who was put on hiatus from chemotherapy due to a bone infection incurred after a tooth extraction procedure.

For my research in Dr. Kirkman’s lab, I was able to successfully amplify the beta subunit 2 gene from p. falciparum.  I redesigned the primers for beta subunit 3 as the ones previous designed did not work and I also designed primers for the remaining subunits 4, 6, and 7.  For beta subunits 1, 2, and 5, which have all been successfully isolated, the DNA fragments were inserted into plasmids and amplified in E. coli with the TOPO blunt PCR cloning technique.