"My name is Eunah Lee and we are at the NIH clinical center.
We all know our blood type.
We could be A positive for example.
There are 35 blood group systems and not many people know that.
One of the blood group systems is called Sienna.
As an intern, my goal is to sequence and find the genetic code of the full length protein
that encodes the Sienna blood group system.
I've always been interested in Science, that's a given.
My dad used to be a scientist and he used to be interested in microbiology.
Interestingly when I got into college and I started looking at the science courses microbiology
really hit me as a very interesting topic.
My first genetics class helped me and made me look for genetics laboratories to see if
I could get a sense of what the wet lab was like in genetics.
When I was studying genetics, what interested me most were the ethical issues that arise
from modern genetic technology.
Now my main interest is in genetics and ethics.
We have information that we're uncovering now.
As an intern I'm going to be submitting some pieces of code, genetic code, into databases
that all these scientists use all over the world, so that's super exciting.
I'm going to continue sequencing all the individuals that we have samples from, so we have genotypic
information from major sequencing technologies, but the genotype is both of your parents chromosomes
mixed in you.
What we want to do is to uncover the sequence on one strand, so that one strand from your
mom or that one strand from your dad and see what makes you up.
We have computers doing that.
We have software programs and the interesting thing is that the software programs that I'm
using are giving slightly different results so that's another thing that I'm looking out
for.
There is a wet lab technique to bypass that and actually uncover the peplo type information
on one chromosome, but that just takes a long time to do.
I carry this handy dandy notebook around with me the whole day.
I record as I do PCR.
The goal is to amplify little pieces of the gene and amplify meaning just make lots and
lots of copies of it.
After I do that, I check to see if they're amplified using a technique called Gel Electrophoresis
and if they did make lots of copies of that DNA sequence then the gel will show bands
and I will know that I was successful.
After that I purify what I get and I prepare it for the sequencing machine and once I load
[inaudible 00:03:19] into the sequencer, the sequencer will use capillary gels and figure
the individual base pairs on the whole sequence.
Through this summer I got to experience the power of modern genetic technology first hand
and right now genetics is such a hot field and there's so many exciting avenues to explore
so I've also learned in lab that there's also instances were things don't go out the way
they should or the way that you want them too and there's limits to the technology even
now.
One thing I would recommend to any student interested in lab is to search for really
good mentors because they make or break the experience.
Hi Dr. Fuego.
Dr. Fuego: Hello, how are you doing?
Eunah Lee: Good.
Dr. Fuego: How's it going today?
Eunah Lee: It's going pretty well.
In my case my mentors were very experienced so they were able to give me reasonable goals
for this summer and whenever you have a problem, they know what to do immediately and from
that it can really catalyze your learning experience in the lab and you will learn very,
very quickly."