Poster presentation at the ASBMB annual conference in Seattle, Washington.

Author: Vitali Maldonado | Major: Biomedical Engineering | Semester: Spring 2023

Hello everyone, I am Vitali Maldonado, and I am a senior biomedical engineering student at the University of Arkansas. I have been doing research for almost 3 years at Dr. Samsonraj’s lab in the same department. My work in this lab focuses on improving cell therapy and assessing the quality of mesenchymal stem cells for their use in regenerative medicine. The project I have been recently working on tested the effect of repetitive passaging on cell differentiation and immunomodulation.

This March, I had the incredible opportunity to present my research at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) conference in Seattle, Washington through a poster presentation. During this presentation, I received both positive comments and constructive feedback. The comments were motivating and highlighted the importance of my research in the real world. For example, someone who worked at a hospital and extracted cardiac tissue from patients to isolate stem cells mentioned that the problem I am addressing with my research is a real struggle for him and people who work with cells. Moreover, some people suggested implementing alternative strategies to measure cell quality and immunomodulation that might be more precise and lead to better results. Also, I actively listened to different points of view on projects that are trying to address a similar problem through the conversations I had at this conference. This gave me new ideas and motivated me to continue working on my research. Nevertheless, I had the opportunity to network with people working in related areas ranging from undergraduate students, graduate students, people in the industry, and people in academia. The conversations gave me guidance on my career and future. Moreover, these conversations and other posters informed me of the latest research performed in the field of biochemistry and molecular biology. This allowed me to learn about the innovative strategies and ideas that researchers from labs all around the United States have.

I also had the opportunity to attend multiple lectures that talked about state-of-the-art research that many labs are currently doing. The lectures I attended focused on cellular metabolism, protein structures, cell proliferation and function dependency on the environment, and biochemistry and molecular biology education. These lectures helped me identify specific markers that are essential for cell proliferation and differentiation and that could help me assess the quality of the cells I am studying. Moreover, I learned that the environment plays an important role in determining which genes are essential for growth. Since my lab does mostly in-vitro work, the nutrient, oxygen, and temperature conditions determine which genes are essential for cells to grow. Additionally, learned some tools that could help me study the function and structure of proteins/substances I am interested in. For example, some pages that could help me visualize proteins/genes and learn more about them are Uniprot.org, CD-HIT, NCBI-BLAST, Cytoscape, Pubchem, Drugbank, UniProt, and Protopedia. I plan to implement everything that I learned to advance in my studies and career.

Finally, for anyone attending a scientific conference and/or presenting a poster, I would recommend connecting with as many people as you can since most of the people there have similar interests and could help you advance in your career. I plan to continue working on my research with the new ideas I gathered in this conference and try to communicate my findings through as many presentations and papers as I can.