Emma Chowdhury ’18 Summer Internship at Bruker Daltronics (Part 2)
A lot has progressed in my internship since my last blog post, over two months ago. Although I am no longer going into the office for my internship, my project has continued. About five weeks in, my supervisors, Paul and Linny, decided that my internship was too short to complete the entire Image ID Workflow, which was the original plan. However, we continued on with the MALDI Imaging aspect of it, which was very successful.
My supervisors and I worked with a client from UToronto, who is researching the effects of cardiovascular disease. He sent us six different samples of mouse hearts — three were control, and three had experienced a simulated heart attack. A tissue section was taken from each type of heart (one control, one test) one week, two weeks, and four weeks after the simulated heart attacks resulting in a pair of tissues from Week 1, Week 2, and Week 4. We worked with these tissues quite a lot, first imaging them (MALDI Imaging) and then attempting to LC-MALDI (the identification of peptides) on it. The LC-MALDI process for tissues is very time-intensive, so the preparation for it (digesting the tissue and collecting the solution to put into the LC-MALDI machine) would take an entire day. Then, we would run the samples, which would take hours. On top of all that, it never worked properly for us in the time I was there.
Despite that setback, we were still able to collect viable results from the MALDI Imaging run. Even without a large amount of data analysis, we were able to see the vast differences in protein profiles between the control mouse hearts and the affected ones. This is what the client had been looking for — how the molecular makeup of a heart changed from a heart attack. We then gave the data to another employee of Bruker to do a more in-depth analysis of the data, complete with PCA plots and computer-generated significant mass points for each set of mouse heart tissues.
Even though I’m not in the office any longer, I am continuing to work with this data, condensing it into what is essentially a lab report. I submitted an abstract of the work to a science conference in Reno this October (called SciX), and that got accepted! So, I’ll be going to this conference and presenting the work I did with everyone else at Bruker.
