Tell me about your experience on the internship programme
I’m grateful to the department for the opportunity to participate in the summer internship programme because I was keen to gain lab experience for my future career. I would like to go on to complete a DPhil, so this was very valuable to me. I was very lucky, my supervisor was a great teacher and shared his experiences with me – this was more than I could learn in standard labs. In my normal lab time, as part of my degree, things are more structured to avoid failure and ensure that work is completed. In an internship you have more control over the work but have to figure out what to do if something goes wrong, and this builds resilience as a researcher.
What impact has it had on your studies?
The internship has given me a different perspective on Biochemistry. Lectures and tutorials focus on practical techniques and real-world examples to study. From the internship, I gained a greater appreciation of the intricacies of how and why various techniques that we use in the lab work, putting the theory I’ve learned in class into practice. I was able to figure out how to use a technique to optimal effect in experiments and apply it, and then develop a more in-depth understanding of it.
What was your key takeaway?
To be resilient. There were ups and downs during the internship and my supervisor warned me that science is generally very slow, which was new to me because I’d never had to consider this very practical aspect of science before. It’s opened my eyes to the field and to the necessity for patience and resilience. Things can go wrong and you just go back to step one and start again. In labs there isn’t enough time to do this so you use another lab group’s data to do the writeup and submit your assignment. However, on the internship you try and figure out where the mistake happened and how to avoid it happening again. All this showed me that science can be frustrating and difficult and helped me to double up my resilience, allow breathing space and start again.
Would you recommend the summer internship to others?
Definitely. Anyone who’s doing life science, even if they are not considering academia, industry or a lab-based career, could still gain great experience on the internship because the department prioritises people who haven’t had internships before. This means that more people get a chance to build their skills, resilience and awareness of the field. I think everyone should do it, it’s great the department does so much to widen participation.
So, finally, tell us about your project
I was assigned two projects, one experimental and the other computational.
My experimental project involved verifying Alphafold2 predicted interactions between Miro1 and 6 potential binding partners. I did this via a combination of Fluorescence Imaging and Co-Immunoprecipitation. I cloned a 100 amino acid fragment (inclusive of residue interacting with Miro1) of the binding partner with GFP into mammalian cells. Then, I overexpressed Miro1 in the cells and tried to see if GFP fluorescence was mitochondrial or cytoplasmic. The idea was that if binding partner does indeed interact with Miro1, under the overexpression of Miro1 it would be interact and co-localise with the mitochondria which can be imaged. Using this approach, I was able to verify 3 out of the 6 binding partners interacted with Miro1. To further probe this, I conducted a Co-Immunoprecipitation and Site Directed Mutagenesis to see if interaction was abolished upon removing the residue which interacts with Miro1. I also did more imaging to see if mutant proteins resulted in cytoplasmic localisation of GFP fluorescence. These experiments yielded interesting results which I couldn’t investigate during my internship due to time restraints but allowed me to brainstorm what I could do to further characterise the interactions.
My computational project involved using Alphafold 2 to investigate conformational changes in Miro1. Current literature and evidence shows that Miro1 has homology with Rab GTPase proteins, and Alphafold 3 also predicts it to bind GTP. However, there is a lack of evidence concretely proving Miro1 has GTPase activity and whether it undergoes conformational changes to hydrolyse GTP. I created a pipeline adapted from Del Alamo et al, where accuracy of Alphafold 2 was reduced for it to predict alternative conformations. Del Alamo et al successfully showed that this approach is useful in predicting different conformations of membrane transporter proteins, however I had more trouble in achieving this due to lack of structural studies concerning Miro1. Regardless, this project showed me the value of computational methods, and I’m hoping to use Molecular Dynamics to investigate whether Miro1 is capable of conformational changes and whether this is linked to its predicted GTPase activity.
