Making Reagents
Author: Abby Denison | Major: Biomedical Engineering | Semester: Spring 2023
My name is Abby Denison, and I recently graduated with a B.S. in biomedical engineering from the College of Engineering. My mentor was Timothy Muldoon, M.D., Ph.D., from the biomedical engineering (BMEG) department, also in the College of Engineering. This grant supported my research during the spring semester of 2023. Since I’ve already graduated, my research has mostly drawn to a close, and my future plans include taking a gap year to work in healthcare and apply for PA schools.
The title of my research project was “The Correlation of Intracellular Metabolites with Optical Metabolic Imaging in Polarized Macrophages as Indicators of Metabolic Reprogramming,” which I realize is excessively long and highly specific, but it’s not so scary once it’s broken down. It was part of a larger project of one of the Ph.D. students who was working in my lab. Essentially, my research was investigating the relationship between intracellular metabolites involved in macrophage metabolism and different types of fluorescence imaging. Optical fluorescence imaging methods such as multiphoton microscopy and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) have been used in the past to determine certain cellular properties that are indicative of the metabolic state of the cell. Macrophages are a type of immune cell that play an important role in tumor progression/inhibition and can be identified by their metabolic state. Therefore, these imaging methods have been used to identify different types of macrophages due to their ability to detect changes in metabolism. My research sought to verify that the metabolic changes being observed in the macrophages using multiphoton and FLIM imaging were, in fact, due to changes in metabolism rather than changes in outside factors. This was done by seeking to establish correlations between intracellular metabolites that are associated with different metabolic pathways and the optical imaging data. The goal was to effectively link changes in cellular metabolism to changes in multiphoton and FLIM measurements.
Since these imaging tools are already widely used, being able to establish correlations of this type would just be a method of verifying their accuracy as a means of detecting cellular metabolism. This would allow these imaging methods to be implemented in future studies with more confidence and research to back the accuracy of the data produced. Another potential real-world application of this research is that it could help to further the use of these imaging modalities as a way of assessing metabolic changes in different immune cells upon their activation and in the presence of different pathogens as well.
Although I ended up with a topic that I was really interested in, I didn’t initially come to my mentor with a project already in mind. I remember being a freshman and sophomore and being so confused as to how I was supposed to figure out such a specific research topic and experiment for myself and having no idea where to start. For me though, I found that the best place to start was just to read about the different faculty members in my department and what their research was about. I found that most professors enjoy talking about their research to students who are interested, and simply expressing interest in his research was how I found my mentor. Once I joined the lab, I was able to choose between two current projects that I wanted to be a part of. So, while I was able to choose the type of research that I wanted to be involved in broadly when I reached out to certain professors, I didn’t choose my research topic specifically, which honestly took a lot of pressure off of me, and I was grateful for it.
Throughout the year-long course of working on this project, I learned far more about macrophage metabolism and autofluorescence imaging than I ever expected to. Certainly, I became a relative expert in the very specific topic of macrophage differentiation. That knowledge didn’t come without setbacks, however. I worked in collaboration with a Ph.D. student in my lab named Shelby, and even though we devised our research plan over the summer of 2022, we weren’t able to carry out most of it until nearly an entire semester later in the spring of 2023. We kept running into problems with contamination with the cell culture, insufficient quantities of cells for our assays, difficulties in harvesting cells, and necessary reagents that were lost in shipping. This made for a somewhat frustrating fall semester, but patience and perseverance were all that was needed to overcome these problems. It taught me that even when a research plan seems simple and straightforward, problems are inevitable but can almost always be overcome. It helped that throughout the process, Shelby and my mentor, Dr. Muldoon, were extremely helpful and supportive.
The research that I conducted over the past year became my honors thesis that I defended last month and enabled me to graduate with honors. Now that I’m graduated, I plan to take a gap year to work in healthcare and gain some experience before applying to PA schools this fall. Overall, I was very grateful for the opportunity to participate in undergraduate research, and regardless of whether I’ll use the topic-specific knowledge I gained in the future, I thoroughly enjoyed learning about it, and I know that the experience will be helpful regardless.