Gearing up for Fall Semester!

Woo! I can’t believe it is already August. This summer has flown by so fast between meetings, conferences, vacations, moving, ect. It feels like just a week ago I was a first year graduate student afraid of holding a pipette or to ask questions, and yet I have been here for a year now. As part of being a graduate student, we have to set-up a thesis committee of advisors who help mentor us in our project and throughout our career, so the past several weeks have consisted of some reflection and debate as to who to ask to be on my committee. However, I feel super confident that I have chosen great advisors to mentor me on this journey. Additionally we have to choose classes for our second year, which is always slightly stressful, but I am hopeful that they will be fun and not detract too much from my lab time.
Speaking of lab, I have been working to finish up my CRISPR/ Cas HDR experiment and am anxiously waiting on those results. I have been spending much of my time in the zebrafish room, organizing fish, screening fish, collecting eggs, and doing microinjections. Right now I am attempting to create a fish that is Myc-GFP positive and Fli:mCherry positive, which creates a green thymus with red blood vessels. We then image these fish under a Confocal microscope to see the red and green at the same time, and by doing so we can track how a tumor develops and become leukemic! How cool is science??