Aptamer FTW

hai kawan kawan

setelah sekian lama. mari mengarut.

so its our final year babyyy! :)
i just cant describe how excited i am to finish up my degree
and be home for good.
no one will know, maybe ina knows.

okay, sumorang pun ade FYP kan before grad.
harini amirah nak cakap pasal honours thesis research she's currently working on.
so here in carleton same je cam malaysia (kot), kene cari prof sendiri that will supervise and willing to have us in their lab. alhamdulillah, its not very hard for me to get one.

im under Dr Maria DeRosa whos working generally on nanotechnology and specifically on aptamer. this project is a one-year lab based research which will be evaluated through our poster presentation and a thesis write-up. so she gave me 3 choices for my research;

1. aptamer selection through SELEX
2. aptamer as biosensor
3. aptamer for drug delivery

and i chose the first one.
aptamer is a sequence of nucleic acid that will bind to specific target with a very f'king high affinity. the reason choosing the first topic because its the basic and first step to develop an aptamer before using it as biosensor or aid in drug delivery. so Maria assigned me with Ryan Walsh, a gentleman doing 3rd year phD in DeRosa lab. My thesis, insyaAllah, will sound like this

Aptamer selection for kallikrein through SELEX technique

Kallikrein is an enzyme that is known to have an important role in cancer, be it as detector or as the cause. the objective of our project is to find a sequence of DNA that will bind to kallikrein and inhibits the enzyme activity or as a marker for detecting cancer. the latter is not our focus though.

To illustrate how SELEX works, one of my labmate, also a phD student, came out with idea of dancing her thesis, which is also on aptamer. (well, everyone in the lab is working on aptamer, but with different perspective and focus) unfortunately, im not in the team because they did it last summer and i joined the lab starting fall. too bad. oh well, dancing is not my thing anyways.
to anyone with high level of curiousity to know how it works, click here.

lets enjoy our final year while it lasts because we will be missing it, definitely, sometime later no matter how hard it's treating us now. well, good thing does not come easy, y'know?

selamat berjaya rakan rakan!
see you in less than a year time, insyaAllah :)

ps: sorry mok, my post's mood is not parallel to yours :|