This summer, I interned at the Dooms Laboratory in Boston University for six weeks. The Dooms Laboratory is in the Microbiology Department associated with the Boston University Medical Campus, and they study autoimmune disorders. One of the disorders they look at is Type 1 Diabetes, which is what I studied. I spent my time running various procedures such as RNA isolations, qPCRs, and ELISAs; shadowing my mentor, Jaileene Hernandez Escalante, in her projects to learn more lab techniques; reading papers to better understand the research being done; and working on my own research project. My research project examined the relation between dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids and a specific type of immune cell called Th17. At the end of the six weeks, all the interns in the program attended a poster symposium. All sixty of us made posters showcasing what we had been working on, and we, along with our parents, PIs, and mentors, had the chance to see the work other people had been doing. There were some truly remarkable projects in every field imaginable: biophysics, chemical engineering, and astronomy just to name a few. Every intern also had to submit an abstract, and we were given a book with everyone’s abstract in it. My abstract summarizing my research is as follows:
Type 1 Diabetes is an autoimmune disorder characterized by autoreactive T cells attacking beta cells in the pancreas. This causes insulin levels to decrease throughout an individual’s life until essentially no insulin is being produced. The instances of individuals with low-risk alleles for T1D acquiring the disease has been increasing, which shows that environmental factors have a role in the occurrence of T1D.
