Fearless

So I haven't written in a while or had any life crises or anything so I figured I'd just write about what I've been doing and learning life wise this summer. I'm doing research at Duke through the Bass Connections program so I get lots of money to live here and then go to a neuroimmunology conference in Montana in the middle of July. I'm looking at how overexpression of a protein whose gene has been shown to predispose Alzheimer's disease affects a mitochondrial stress response called the unfolded protein response. Pretty much it means that when there are a lot of unfolded proteins in the mitochondria, there are pathways that cause more chaperones and proteases to be transcribed and translated to deal with it. It's an interesting project, though it's hard to see the real world application right away. It was for me anyway. If this mitochondrial stress response is an implication of Alzheimer's, we can try to treat the cells with drugs and see how th...