Week 8: Wrapping it up

Hello!

I spent all of this week traveling to visit colleges, which was very exciting! However, I did also spend some time thinking about the next steps in my project. Though my results from last week were very positive, I want to run an RT-PCR on my samples to see the relative amounts of “good luciferase mRNA” and “bad luciferase mRNA.” The results from this should strongly confirm that my splicing reporter works.

Since we plan to CRISPR this splicing reporter into our iPSCs (which we will differentiate into cardiomyocytes), we also have to think about:

1. Where in the genome should we put our insert
2. What promotor should our insert be expressed by

These are considerations that I’ll be researching this week, by going through scientific articles that have addressed similar concerns. I’m also starting to work on my presentation and am finishing my first heart health video!