My six weeks of research was a stressful, confusing and yet extremely fulfilling experience. Over the course of a month and a half I got to truly experience the highs and lows of research. While I knew that research would be tough, a small part of me had an idea that I would just be magically good at it with no practice. However, I soon learned that this notion was ridiculous. However, my actual research goals weren’t exactly a success. I felt that I really achieved the goal set out in my PDP.In terms of improving my resilience and time optimisation I saw myself learning these skills in real time. As for my goal to get better at reflection I honestly didn’t spend enough time doing this. However, in the process of writing this report I have taken the time to reflect and I’ve learned a lot from it.  While the original project was on the antimicrobial action of capsaicin on H. pylori my research ended up changing pretty dramatically during the 6 weeks. 

One of the components that I added into my project was the decision to look at the impact of capsaicin on gastric cancer cells. My supervisor briefly mentioned that It might be an area worth looking into. When doing my lit review I came across a number of papers which have looked at the effect of capsaicin on gastric cancer. While the in vitro models seemed to indicate that capsaicin was gastroprotective and was helpful in preventing the growth of tumours. The in vivo models found that capsaicin was actually carcinogenic. With these findings being so vastly different my interest was piqued. Then my H. pylori samples failed to grow and I wouldn’t be able to make up another sample until a week later so I decided to use this time to explore this concept. I have never worked in cell culture before so this was certainly a learning experience for me. I decided to perform a resazurin assay on my gastric cancer cell line. This is a measure of cell viability. However, due to the incubator breaking I was only able to do one replicate for this experiment so I had to once again try to come up with a new angle for my research. 

One of the reasons that things didn’t go according to my original plan is that I simply lacked microbiology training. While I had done a few microbiology labs in the first/second year of my degree my research project  required me to use much more advanced techniques and to work with  bacteria that was much trickier to culture. I made a lot of mistakes which resulted in a lot of contaminated samples and therefore, useless results. H. pylori is also very tricky to grow. In order for my experiments to work I had to have the broth the right temperature and work extremely quickly to ensure that the H. pylori cells weren’t out of the incubator for more than 15 minutes. In the end none of my H. pylori experiments had positive growth controls. This is why I had to switch the focus of my project to klebsiella and pseudomonas. H. pylori cells take three days to grow so I was only able to run about two experiments per week. However, klebsiella and pseudomonas grow so quickly and so well that I could use them to run multiple experiments each day. I ended up doing the experiments planned for H. pylori ( broth MICs, biofilm assays and resazurin assays) on the klebsiella and pseudomonas and these formed the basis of my project. 

Another issue I ran into was the fact that oils such as chilli oil are quite difficult to work with when it comes to antimicrobial studies. First of all oils are lipophilic and they will not mix properly with the water based broths which are used to grow bacteria. If I tried to add the oil directly to a mix of broth and bacteria ( as would be traditionally done when testing the antimicrobial properties of various compounds) the oil and broth would separate so that the oil would be in a layer on top of the broth and as a result  would have no access to the bacteria. To combat this problem I decided to try and make an emulsion of the oil and broth. I did this using the method done by a previous paper. While the oil did form an emulsion it did not yield very useful results. This is because of how turbid the emulsion was. In antimicrobial studies the amount of bacteria is measured by measuring the optical density i.e the turbidity of the liquid. The more turbid the liquid, the more bacteria are present. However, as my emulsion was very turbid this threw off the accuracy of the reading. In order to see to what extent this was happening I introduced a new control into my experiment  which was just a row of the different dilutions of the emulsion. The optical density of this control and the wells with bacteria in it were very similar meaning that I couldn’t use these results to definitively prove anything. It felt like once again nothing was working. One of the PhD students suggested trying out a resazurin assay with this experiment. This assay measures the number of viable cells i.e alive cells. It works by adding another regent and then fluorescing it so turbidity does not affect the results. This worked really nicely and I was finally able to get some results out of this set of experiments. Unfortunately, time constraints meant that I wasn’t able to do many repetitions of this experiment. I also decided to look at the effect of capsaicin on the pseudomonas and klebsiella. Capsaicin is the most abundant active component in chilli oil so it was very interesting to look at the results of capsaicin in its isolated form. 

Throughout the project I often felt really inadequate. I kept making mistakes that can only be described as stupid and ruining my experiments. It became really tough for me not to get disheartened and I had to be constantly reminding myself not to be too hard on myself. It was a bit of a strange feeling to deal with. I never really expected to be accepted into this program and then when I was I felt like maybe I was good enough to do this. It was a real boost to my confidence and I began to think that I shouldn't doubt myself so much in future. I even set one of my PDP goals to be an improvement in my self confidence. So when I started to make mistakes and not live up to my expectations with regards to my project it felt like I was right all along - I’m not smart or talented - I just got lucky. The middle few weeks of my project were really tough - the feeling of inadequacy I began to feel in relation to my project work began to seep into other aspects of my life like my relationships and my hobbies. It wasn’t until one of my ALS meetings that I began to realise that I wasn’t alone in this feeling. All the other students doing lab based projects were dealing with almost the exact same situation as me. From making mistakes to feeling like an imposter, I heard others voice the exact same experience as me. I hated to hear them talking about themselves in this manner. I wished they could see them as I saw them as incredibly talented and passionate young people. It was this realisation that helped me to be kinder to myself. I’m only just starting my third year. The fact that I was able to get into this program at all is a real achievement, even though my research didn’t go to plan. 

If I was to do my project over again I think I would have changed the time at which I did it. Originally I planned to do my project at the start of the Summer. That way if anything went wrong I’d have loads of time to work on my poster even after the 6 weeks were over. However, Dublin accommodation proved to be really difficult to find ( shocker) and as a result I was only able to start my research in mid July. I finished my research on the 30th of August meaning I had to get an extension for my poster. I had been working on the reflective report throughout the project so I wasn’t under too much stress with that. I’m really glad I chose to write reflective paragraphs during my 6 weeks of research and then edit these to make the reflective report. This saved me a lot of time and stress. As for the blog post, I’ve always enjoyed writing and thus was able to get that finished pretty quickly. However, it was the research poster that I was really stressed out about. While initially I tried to do my research poster alongside doing my lab work I ended up changing my project quite a bit. Then once I realised my project would look a bit different I was so busy with lab work that I wasn’t able to work on my poster. Trying to get my poster finished was a really stressful experience. At least I got it done in the end. 

In terms of the scientific findings of my research, my experiments had really interesting results. However, they weren’t the results that I was expecting as I had to focus on a different type of bacteria. While originally I was going to be looking at the antimicrobial action of capsaicin on H. pylori I ended up having to use klebsiella and pseudomonas. It turns out that capsaicin actually increases the growth of these bacteria. However, when I did a biofilm assay the results showed that the amount of biofilm produced decreased. This is really interesting and unexpected. There was a similar trend of the results when I used the chilli oil although the concentrations were much lower. While I wasn’t able to gather many results for H. pylori specifically, I did also look at the action of capsaicin on gastric cancer cells. The results showed that their growth was inhibited by higher concentrations of capsaicin and the lower concentrations did not affect them at all. This was a really interesting result to get especially considering the significant link between H. pylori and gastric cancer. 

In terms of the next steps for this research I’d love to actually try these experiments on H. pylori cells. That’s what I was originally interested in and I am really disappointed that I didn’t get to run these. However, in terms of  the actual research I did, I’d love to look at why I got the results I got. It’s really interesting to see that capsaicin increases the growth of klebsiella and pseudomonas cells but I want to look more into why I’m getting these results. For the increased growth someone could look into how capsaicin affects their metabolism, perhaps it’s used as a food source or to help the bacteria outcompete other organisms. In terms of the decline in biofilm production it could be useful to look at how that could be applied in a clinical setting and whether or not this could be of any benefit to patients in the future. It would also be interesting to look into what type of biofilm it impacts. 

It’s funny because looking back at my experience doing the project I was under a huge amount of stress and pressure. There were times where I felt that I really had a negative impact on my self esteem. However, after these six weeks I’m actually more likely to work in research than I was before. When I look back on my experience the root issue was the time constraints. If I wasn’t under such time pressure the stress of experiments not working out wouldn’t have been half as bad. In terms of the actual research I really enjoyed, I really liked getting to work in a lab and try to answer questions I was interested in using various scientific techniques. I enjoyed how much independence I had. This sounds silly but I even enjoyed the desk based part of research. All that time spent pouring over academic papers really made me think more about what type of research I wanted to do and I could build on what had been done before. 

In terms of what I learned about myself as a leader, the main thing that stood out to me was that I needed to learn when to ask others for help. This project involved a lot of self leadership and I realised the importance of also working with others in self leadership. I was so nervous about being seen as stupid or dumb that I was sometimes reluctant to ask the post docs/PhD students for help with my project. Everytime I asked they were really reassuring and helpful but I just felt that I was bothering them with my incessant questions. In hindsight I should have just reached out earlier and saved myself from making some really dumb mistakes. I also learned about the importance of making decisions while being a leader. I noticed that when I struggled to make decisions it threw the whole project off. I was floundering for weeks, unsure of what to do. I was able to come up with a plan for how to make quick and effective decisions and I think that this new skill will really improve my leadership skills. 

Overall there’s no point in lying and pretending that this wasn’t a stressful experience because in all honesty it really was. However, I would do it again in a heartbeat. I’ve learned so much over the past six weeks, not necessarily about the antimicrobial action of capsaicin on H. pylori but about myself and what I want to do with my life.