Working With the MitoSENS Team at the SENS Foundation
Life science students intern at the SENS Foundation research center in the Bay Area as a part of the Foundation's broader academic initiative, working on the foundations of future rejuvenation therapies. Biotechnology has advanced to the point at which bright graduates can help to meaningfully advance the state of the art, and here is a report from one such: "Sarah Fazal joined our research center team as an intern for the summer. Over the past few months, she worked with our MitoSENS team, primarily verifying the integration of DNA transfected into cells and detecting RNA expression levels. Her efforts contributed greatly to the progress our MitoSENS team has made over recent months, and she presented those results in a poster at our recent SENS5 conference in Cambridge. ... The current project for mitoSENS is allotopic expression, which involves copying the mitochondrial DNA into the nucleus. My project required checking for integration of the DNA transfected into cells, and detecting RNA expression levels. By the end of the summer, I had done this successfully for 4 out of the 13 genes involved in oxidative phosphorylation that are still encoded by mitochondrial DNA. I spent my summer mostly doing PCRs (polymerase chain reaction), DNA and RNA isolations, cell culturing, and gel electrophoresis. I learned to perfect these techniques, to think critically when my results weren't as expected, and to design experiments. My experience at SENS helped shape me into a more confident and better experienced scientist. I would definitely recommend volunteering for this foundation; the experience was educational, the research is open-minded, determined, and bold, and the staff is friendly, welcoming, and helpful."