Room for Revision

The week of January 24th saw a moderate amount of progress, mostly due to my revision of my original product proposal. As I mentioned in one of my previous blog posts, I was very dissatisfied with my first proposal after I faced difficulties executing it and I talked about it with my mentor in early January. Dr. Sullivan pointed out the basic information about the three diseases I'm researching (albinism, cystic fibrosis, and Down syndrome), and launched an idea to maybe create a karyotype for each. Then, to holistically explain each disease, I would present the different affected genes & variants that contribute to it. On Thursday, I transferred all of this to my original product proposal and removed the former plan to research SNPs using databases. Now, I would broaden my sources to anything credible online, not just databases. This was because, as I found out earlier, using only databases is frustrating when they might be missing information.

In addition to my product proposal, I have created a sort of weekly plan leading up to early May, when the original work is due. It is likely subject to change, but at least I have goals in mind for the near future.

Furthermore, I have completed two chapters in Genetics in Medicine (7th edition), which were assigned to me by my mentor. She intended for me to review and build on my foundations, and that worked out well. I actually found the text to be interesting, and I learned some new vocabulary and expanded greatly on some genetics topics. Also beneficial were the sections on gene mapping and karyotyping, since those will be useful for my original work.

As of today, I have a mentor meeting with Dr. Sullivan in the late afternoon, where I will be reviewing my revised product proposal and the textbook chapters with her. Hopefully, I will get some questions I have on my mind answered as well. As per the future, for the next 2 weeks I will be working on researching cystic fibrosis. I still need to figure out how I will animate/present the karyotypes. In my proposal, I have stated I will be using PowerPoint, but there may be better options.