Episode 2: Hopefully I'll get a meeting

 

This week on the meme team, 2EZ4RTZ is the meme of the day. But in all seriousness this week has kinda been awkward for me. On one hand I read deep into the literature of my topic and realized the real world implications of it. On the other hand I really wish I could arrange a meeting with my professor to help me confirm my research and hopefully give me some guidance. I’ll talk about the first topic first.

So I read the literature I had available to me, and I figured out the real world implications of my research. Protein folding is not an easy process and nature has created all of the most efficient working proteins. All man made proteins have only been done on a small scale and these proteins are significantly less efficient then the wild types (originals). Eventually scientists were like wtf we can’t create any proteins we gotta find a cheat for this process. Then probably some genius in the protein lab was like dude lets just take a natural protein and guide its evolution to serve a purpose that we want it too, its just 2EZ4RTZ. That genius was definitely Artour Babaev. Jokes aside they actually did that and it worked on large-scale proteins unlike the smaller scale ones from before. However Mother Nature was one step ahead of them, and the manufactured proteins were no where near as efficient as the wild types. The way they guide these proteins is by introducing mutations to change the proteins function. This is my angle, I one up the Artours and figure out whether these mutations actually significantly affect certain areas over others. However this is where topic two is gutting me.

My professor, greatest person in the world btw (I mean what professor is kind enough to let a 15 year old join her lab), has been sick all week. This means she definitely isn’t in the office taking care of her grad students. So she’s coordinating emails with them and me. We tried to set up this Saturday morning but it didn’t work out, so I sent her an email about her second available time this Monday afternoon. She is usually godspeed with anything I do, so this illness is pretty serious. I know the general area of research, hell I even know how to do my primary research with the ASU Supercomputer, but I really need the help with my research topic and why LAC1 and other questions. Also I kind of need her original research paper, the paper closest to my topic. It’s kinda like not free online. But maybe she even has an entirely different topic of research ready for me to dive into (in the protein folding field of course).

So to recap, I figured out real world applications and the surrounding field, but I really need to organize this meeting with my professor. My plan moving forward is look into the research on my own and organize the meeting. In terms of struggling, the field is pretty specific with some studies in academic conversation with each other, so I plan to expand my search area into protein folding in general to set up the significance of my future research. So like fingers crossed this meeting happens SOON.