Week 2 Blog
Xieyue Xiao
Clinician: Dr. Michael Satlin
Department: Infectious DiseaseThe second week goes fast and it is very pleasant to work with Dr. Satlin and other members in the department.
I went to the plate rounds every day in the microbiology lab. Some days it is led by Dr. Westblade and some days it is Dr. Jenkins. During the plate round, we go around and ask every group in the lab if they have any questions or interesting results to show. I learned lots of knowledge from the plate rounds every day. Different groups in the lab have different responsibilities, like Specimen processing, urine/blood/stool specimen culturing, and MALDI. The one we can always get interesting results or slides to check and also my favorite is the Mycology lab. Here I have seen many beautiful fungi isolated from the clinical samples and also fun knowledge about fungi.
As for my own project, it goes a little bit slower than I expected. The previous research fellow who took care of the stool samples left last week. I and the new assistant spent this week trying to find the 300 samples from the crowded freezer. But finally, we did it! Meanwhile, I also refined the protocols with Dr. Satlin. We add more experiments to do and scheduled to start the experiment together next Wednesday.
This Friday, I attended the “10th Annual Infectious Diseases Update”. Thanks to Dr. Satlin I got the registration fee waived. There were 5 talks and I found the ones about Tickborne diseases, New antibiotics, and Long-lasting HIV drugs most impressive and interesting to me. Below are some pictures taken at the talks.
Are plate rounds more purely focused in research? It doesn't sound like there are patients present for them. That's amazing that they do it everyday! I'm surprised there are things to report so frequently, but I guess if you process a massive amount of samples and the number and size of the labs is large then the interesting things/questions add up quickly.
ReplyDeleteImagine helping all these butts, haha.