Elijah was an intern for BYU during Spring 2024.
Briefly explain what you did and the result of your internship.
My work focused on understanding the physiological structural and activity of the N-acylphosphatidylethanolamine Phospholipase D (NAPE-PLD) protein. Specifically, I was tasked with determining if NAPE-PLD exists primarily as a monomer or dimer within the cell as previous evidence suggested it needs to be a dimer to be active. Additionally, I investigated how a previously developed activator drug affected the NAPE-PLDs conformation. To answer the first question, I performed several in vitro and in vivo NAPE-PLD assays and trapped NAPE-PLD in whatever conformation it existed in upon removal from the solution or cell. To determine the conformation of NAPE-PLD within these samples I used gel electrophoresis and western blotting techniques. Unfortunately, our results are inconclusive and the experiments need to be repeated before we can make any sort of conclusion. To answer the second question, I first modeled how the activator might interact with NAPE-PLD using various tools on the ProteinsPlus website. This produce several models that partially agree with previous data but do not reveal what the activator does to NAPE-PLDs conformation. Overall, my work on these projects has helped use refine our protocols for analyzing NAPE-PLD conformation, helped us understand that NAPE-PLD may primarily exist as a monomer, and informed us how our activator drug may affect NAPE-PLD activity. All of these outcomes will further simplify future experiments that will more conclusively determine NAPE-PLDs physiologically active conformation and how our activator drug specifically affects that.
What did you learn in your internship that you were not expecting to learn?
I was not expecting to learn how to search a topic throughout the literature and understand it to the point that I begin applying what I learn to my unique project. As an undergraduate, I had gotten used to the PI or graduate students looking through literature and producing hypothesis and protocols from what they found. Having to do that myself was difficult and taught me how to more effectively read literature and apply what someone else had done to my own work.
How have your future plans changed because of what you learned from your internship experience?
My internship has changed how I plan on participating in research going forward in my career as a scientist. Rather than strictly working on someone else’s project, I plan on pursing my own ideas and hypothesis that I think will have an impact in whatever field I will work in after the internship.
Please share how your experience led to personal inspiration or insightful revelation.
The biggest inspiration that came from my experience was realizing that answering scientific questions requires a lot of carefully planned out time and conscious interaction with the present. Previously, I had been used to doing tasks that we given to me with specific instructions and direct oversight from someone with more experience. While this continued a little during my internship, the majority of my time at Vanderbilt required that I put in more time by myself figuring out what I was going to do to answer a question. My role as a researcher changed from routinely following instructions to individually creating new ideas and making them into scientifically legitimate results. In one instance, I was asked to use a program to figure out how a drug interacts with our protein of interest. While at first it appeared to be very straightforward, the models the software produced were inconclusive and required extra hours studying different literature articles and discussing the models with the PI. This led us to create a valid hypothesis that we are currently planning on testing using experiments that I have helped develop.
Would you recommend this internship to other students?
I would recommend this internship to others because I believe it can provide a unique opportunity to develop critical scientific and life skills people need to be an effective researcher and functioning human in American society.
Is there anything else you would like to say regarding your internship?
I am deeply grateful for those that donated the funds which allowed me to participate in this incredibly opportunity. It has motivated me to one day donate what I have to BYU so that future students can have similar life-changing opportunities.
