Ilise '20 | blogs

Examining Environmental factors in Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition and Mesenchymal-to-Epithelial Transition in Circulating Stem Cells for Glioblastomas.

Hi! I'm Ilise Angel and I'm currently a student at Marin Academy in the MARC Program and I'll be using this blog to track my progress in independent science research. In addition to my interest in science, am also a gymnast and a dancer and I also am a huge fan of figure skating. I also love baking and watching movies.

The latest updates / posts are at the bottom!

Contact Me

1/13/19

Hi, my name is Ilise Angel, and I am currently a Junior at Marin Academy (MA) currently in my first year of the MARC program, or Marin Academy Research Collaborative. However, if you’ve found this, I’m sure you know what that is. I have been ‘exposed’ to science my entire life. First in the most traditional method, museums. My parents took me to so many museums as a child and although I only mildly enjoyed some of them, one of my favorites was always the Tech Museum and the Lawrence Hall of Science. Each of these offered more hands-on experiences which were limited since they were for children, but I was able to build windmills, explore the structure of bridges, grow glowing jellyfish DNA, and learn about the stars all in one place. Yes, it was limited but it fostered in me a love of the unknown and a love of exploration, all of which are prevalent in science research. So, when I by chance took the MARC Elective last year, I wasn’t expecting to love it as much as I did. And that brings us to where we are today, the MARC Program where we are beginning to dive into our individual studies.

At this point, my MARC project is still kind of under construction. Still, recently, I have looked into the molecular classification of cancer through the use of DNA Microarrays and a process called neighborhood analysis. Basically, identifying the molecular properties of different cancers and protein pathways they may activate. I was inspired by a study done by T.R Gloub and a bunch of others (found here) which was used to distinguish ALL from AML Leukemia.

I’m not even sure if this is feasible for our lab and my time capabilities. But, I plan to talk with Kegan Donlan, an adjunct professor at Dominican University and researchers at the Buck Institute on what is possible at MA and for a student like me.

I guess I’ll treat this as a state of the MARC project union address and talk about my summer plans. So, I’m supposed to find an internship but many of them you either have to pay (like at the Buck Institute or any pre-college program), are way too far to drive to every single day (like Stanford or UC Santa Cruz), or are on the East Coast in places I have no relatives or only take applicants over 17 by the start day. Many of these are six to eight weeks and for a student with a relatively short summer and very little free time and it being the summer before senior year, that seems like a lot of commitment, especially since I already work another job regularly. That's not to say I'm against it, I'm just a little hesitant.

In addition to the internship struggle I’ve been having, I’m not 100% sure this is even what I want to do with my project so I plan to talk to the two people / institutions I listed before as well as my mentors at MA, Shawn Cole and Stori Oates to better explore my options. I don’t really feel committed to this idea so by next month my project will have likely changed completely.

Sincerely,

Ilise Angel

1/17/19

I’m back, and my project has changed. Surprise? I was told this blog was supposed to tell a journey, and so it will. Now, my project is focused on CTCs (Circulating Tumor Cells) and Microfluidics. I’ve found three different ‘patterns’ or methods used for the chip design. One of them is a spiral pattern, one a herringbone pattern, and the other using a “low cost” design that employs immunomagnetic bead enrichment. Although I have been told this project is possible, I still have my doubts. Especially since finding a mentor will be much more difficult. Unlike genetics and cancer, microfluidics is a much smaller field, so finding someone researching CTCs and microfluidics will be even more difficult. Luckily, living in the Bay Area has its perks, and there are a good amount of researchers studying Microfluidics. I just have to look through enough to find someone who works in the same field and is interested in helping me. We’ll see how many times I change my project, but hopefully, this is the last. I do still need to discuss the scale and possible approaches to this project with my MARC Mentors at school.

Sincerely,

Ilise Angel

1/24/19

So, I still need to do some work figuring out the feasibility of this project, who to reach out to, and how exactly I’m going to create these chips. So, in the paragraphs below, I will elaborate on each of these three questions and what possible approaches or solutions I could take, which will hopefully help me understand them better as well.

Number one: feasibility. I know at MA, we don’t have a bio printer, which is commonly used for microfluidics. But, I found this article that lists some ways to “diy” microfluidic chips. However, I’m not sure if these will be accurate enough for my type of project. And, some of the approaches listed there would be basically impossible if I were to attempt a herringbone type pattern. I did find a valve controller here, which was unexpected, but a welcome surprise, and I also found some free design files from Stanford. I guess finding resources for this is a lot easier than I expected! The only problem is, it isn’t exactly what I wanted to test. I could look into having one that I design printed elsewhere, but that would mean I would have to figure out how to design one, probably using some incomprehensible and over-complicated program. I did find UFluidix, a company based in Mississauga, which prints microfluidic chips, but I’d have to ask my advisors about pricing.

I haven’t yet talked with my mentors in the program, but I’m hoping they’ll have some possible mentors with connections rather than blindly emailing someone I find online.

3/08/19

So, surprise? I’m changing my project. It’s not really a surprise since I’ve been kind of stuck for the past couple weeks, but I’ll be meeting with Keegan Donlan from Dominican next week to discuss my project but I’ll try and explain my rough idea here. It is semi-related to my last project since I’m looking at circulating tumor stem cells (CTSCs) and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and mesenchymal-epithelial transition (MET) and its role in tumorigenesis specifically with glioblastomas, a particularly aggressive brain tumor. I think I’m going to look at the environmental factors that cause these transitions in and out of the bloodstream, but I haven’t decided which one. And, the cell culture lab at MA seems to be almost ready so hopefully this project will be possible. I kind of stumbled upon it by chance, but I find it very interesting and this week I’m going to do some more reading on EMT and MET as well as stem cells in general.

3/21/19

This week, we decided what our science symposium projects would be. Turns out, it wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be coming into the year. Since I’m in two classes, I have to do two projects. Strangely and kind of coincidentally, they are extremely similar. For my project for MARC, I plan to assess the cytotoxicity of juul fluid (5% Nicotine concentration) on lung epithelial cells using three types of assays: MTT, NRU, and LDH. I’m not too concerned for this one and we are mainly recreating an experiment that’s already been done. I also want to compare the juul fluid to diluted concentrations of nicotine. I think this would give a better idea of the health concerns of juuling over smoking tobacco since juuling is considered “healthier”.

For my second project, for my Advanced Biology class, I plan to examine the effects of juul fluid on C. Elegans. (I promise I’m not obsessed with juuling, my projects just happened to turn out this way and it wasn’t even my idea for either of the projects originally). For this study, we plan on using the wild type of C. Elegans and the CL2166 Strain (which expressed GFP protein when undergoing oxidative stress). So through this, we hope to examine the physiological effects of juul fluid when compared to diluted nicotine in a model organism. (In short studying if juul fluid can induce oxidative stress in comparison to nicotine.) I do like that my projects relate since it gives me a really comprehensive experience of testing something (and allows me to do less background research when writing my introduction for the poster). In one experiment, I test on human cells and the other in a model organism (that also happens to lack lungs). Science Symposium doesn’t start for about a month, giving us a lot of time to culture some cells, figure out how to ‘stick’ some nematodes, and determine exactly what all the assays and tests we’re doing entails. This maybe doesn't seem super related to my project but for MARC (the one with cells), it's supposed to give me insight into the process of cell culture, which I'll need for my future project.