The past two weeks encouraged me to learn more about project management, as well as disparities in biomedical and biological research. The samples I had sent out for sequencing came back with a lot of background noise, meaning I wouldn't be able to finish my original project in time. However, I was able to quickly change gears and create a plan for the last few weeks of the program. After a discussion with my faculty mentor, I've decided to focus on optimizing a protocol for creating cell lines that can be used for future experiments.  I realized that I had been working with a cell line that originally came from a single patient, meaning our conclusions would only be potentially applicable to a subset of patients. Working on optimizing this protocol would allow me to test my research question in cells from various patient populations, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of my original question of how lncRNAs regulate cancer development. In doing so, my original research question will become more of a long-term project, while this project will serve as an intermediate step.

Going off of this, my goal for the next week is to continue working on my experiments but also write all the protocols I will need for the rest of this project. I am going to present what I have done so far and what I hope to do in the coming weeks in order to get feedback from other members of my lab before finalizing these protocols.