Colette Meier ’19: Summer Intern at Bruker Daltonics
I have been given the opportunity to spend my summer working at Bruker Daltonics, a company responsible for the engineering, testing, and marketing of various scientific instruments, all of which involve applications of molecular science. My job as an intern falls under the umbrella terms of ‘testing and marketing’. Under my mentor, Anjali, I am working on a project to study antibodies and present the resulting data to biopharmaceutical companies. These companies, to which we will be marketing the maXis II, use antibodies, the proteins responsible for autoimmune functions, found within living organisms, to create medicines that treat and diagnose illnesses. Part of the process of assembling these medications is the chemical generation and culturing of the various antibodies. Similarly to how a building is built from bricks, proteins are built by long chains of amino acids. When chemically engineered, there is a possibility that any one of those building block amino acids may be incorrect, threatening to render the whole antibody useless in the context of medication. Therefore, biopharmaceutical companies need a way to test their antibodies to ensure that they will have the desired functions and characteristics. By comparing the mass of the experimental antibody to the theoretical one, they can assure that they made the correct protein. The maXis II, the instrument that I have been assigned to work with, is a mass spectrometer with a long time of flight tube that makes for a high resolution capable of detecting the mass of larger molecules. This specific instrument, given its resolution, could be put to use by biopharms to analyze the large protein and peptide molecules they culture.
During my first week here at Bruker, my only task was to become acquainted with and learn the ins and out of the maXis. Until I realized I would need to understand years’ worth of college-level chemistry, this seemed like a simple enough task. Though many of the details of the machine and its applications are still fuzzy, I have gotten a fairly good understanding of how to use the machine, its interior functions, and how to interpret and process data. As I mentioned previously, the maXis is a mass spec instrument; in its simplest definition, mass spectrometry is a method of measuring the masses within any given sample. This method begins with the sample being injected into the machine and ionized by the gas flow that greets it. These ions are then transported through a glass capillary, offset funnels, a hexopole that condenses the ions into a beam, and a quadrupole which can fragment the sample if collision induced dissociation (CID) is enabled by the computer. The ions then enter the orthogonal accelerator, which focuses them into a beam that it angles upward toward the reflectron. After the ion beam reaches the reflectron, it is reflected down into the detector, travelling in a parabolic motion. Due to this last step, the instrument is also referred to as a time of flight mass spec, as the detector calculates and reports to the computer the mass to charge ratio of the sample based on the details of ions’ parabolic motion. In this way the instrument marries mechanical physics to the world of molecular science. This brief explanation of the apparatus is an extremely condensed version of a week’s worth of learning, so there are many intricacies that I have left out and many more I probably don’t even know myself yet.
Since those confusing first few days of exploring the instrument, I have graduated to diluting and experimenting with antibodies in the lab and processing the resulting data on the mass spec. As a result of my mentor having to frequently travel for work, much of my time in the lab has been unsupervised and unguided. It would be an understatement to say I was intimidated walking into the lab for the first time by myself, a notebook in hand full of scribbled chemical reactions my mentor had instructed me to facilitate. Thankfully, the lab is usually empty so there is no one there to witness me accidentally spilling acid and frantically cleaning it up, which has happened once or twice. As time passes, I am becoming increasingly comfortable finding my way around the lab and no longer depend so heavily on my mentor’s instructions. Outside of the lab, I am also adapting to the work environment, becoming less and less intimidated by the adult professionals around me. Once I got over the initial fear of asking the other scientists for help, having convinced myself that I would only be a burden to them, I found that most are more than willing to help me. From what I can tell, the vast majority of the people I am working under are here because they love the science, and they are happy to impart some of that to me. I hope that as I go on to college and begin my career I can preserve that same love and fascination for whatever scientific field I might find myself in.
