1st-Week Blog

Xieyue (Sharon) Xiao

Clinician: Dr. Michael Satlin

Department: Infectious Disease

Everything went smoothly this week. Dr. Satlin was out this Monday and Tuesday so one research assistant, Emily, and the administrator, Roxanne, welcomed me and introduce the labs and rooms to me. Our lab space is on the 4^th floor but we also use the microbiology lab on the 7^th floor of Starr very frequently. I cannot get access between the college and the Starr because I did not get my CWID yet. But it should come soon, and I will be totally set up. Dr. Catherine Small gave a talk at noon on Monday which is about the organ transplantation with HIV patients. This talk is very interesting, and it is surprising to me how advanced these techniques are now.

The management and organization are very different here in the medical school and in the hospital than that in a graduate school. The whole department shares equipment and people. Most of the time, each person takes care of a specific part of the whole process and they are very proficient at that. This also makes things easier for researchers because you do not need to run the assays yourself, just submit and wait for the results.

Dr. Satlin came back on Wednesday, we had a meeting discussing the details of the project I will be doing. He gave me a more detailed introduction about the lab spaces and introduced me to many people. We ordered the reagents I will use later and determined the list of samples I need. It will take a few days for the reagents to arrive so I will use this week to get familiar with the lab and also learn some new techniques.

Thursday and Friday, I did a bunch of E-tests with Emily. This assay is to test the antibiotic susceptibility of different bacteria strains. Specifically, we tested the Levofloxacin susceptibility of the E. coli isolates from some of our patients. The figure below is the results of our quality control plate.

The schedule for next week will be: try to find the samples I need from the -80C freezer and reorganize them, start screening the stool samples for the existence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and preparing 16S sequencing libraries.