A layman's summary: Kiekeboe-virus

Hi all,

I have received some 'complaints' about my blog - many compliments too, thank you thank you - as I am stuck in Cambridge because of my second master internship, and I have not discussed at all what I am doing so far. Therefore, for all the annoying nitwits, I will hereby give you a brief (Selas's brief so you might get a cup of coffee to go with it), layman's summary <3

I am working at the department of Medicine at the Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. It is situated about 15 min out of the centre and forms basically the boundary between the city and the farm fields. The hospital looks quite old from the outside, but the layout of the lab itself is quite new. They are currently building a lot at the site of the hospital, as they want to create a huge biomedical hub (= a specialized centre) for cardiovascular and respiratory research - if I remember correctly. It is a 15 min cycle from my home, which is basically a straight line, crossing three roundabouts and a Coop (supermarket) which is very convenient to drop by on my way home.

Normally I start my day around 9:30am, except for Wednesdays when we have a meeting at 9am and on Fridays when we have a journal club at 10am. I work with a specific member of the herpesvirus family (yes, the STD..) which is called Human Cytomegalovirus, or HCMV. As some of you might know from the herpesvirus which causes the cold sore on the lips, the virus pops up once in a while - KIEKEBOE - and then disappears again. When the virus 'disappears' it actually hides from your immune system inside the nerve cells surrounding your lip, making no 'noice' or 'movement' so it won't get noticed and killed. My virus, HCMV, does the same thing but in different cells. The virus also has other mechanisms to actively mislead or evade the immune system, and as humans will carry the virus with them all their life once infected, they appear to be very good at it. However, HCMV does not lead to any disease in healthy individuals. So the immune system must therefore somehow control the virus. Indeed, HCMV can cause disease in people with a less strong immune response, such as patients after organ transplantation, or pregnant people.

My lab focuses mostly on how the virus is able to escape the immune system and establishes infection for life, while at the same time being so well controlled to not cause disease. I work with a 'wild type' (= original) HCMV virus and a mutant virus, which lacks one of the immune evasion tricks. I infect skin cells with these viruses and do experiments to see the difference between the wild type and the mutant virus. The viruses are modified, so they turn green once they infect a cell, and you can see that with a microscope! We can also get blood from HCMV infected donors, so we can use their 'trained' immune cells to do some experiments with.

The first couple of weeks were not going that smoothly, as my cells were dying after 6 days of infection, while I needed them to last at least 9... So I spent 5 weeks figuring that out, but together with my PI we eventually solved the problem! (okay, he solved it). As this was quite a problem for all the experiments, I've only recently got some data on my wild type and mutant viruses. The data does meet our expectations (or 'hypothesis', jaja) so that is all going great for now. Most of the work has been very basic though, repeating some work that had already been done, and showing that the mutant virus is not behaving very differently from the wild type - if it does you have a problem, because then you cannot compare the two.

I am really, really enjoying the project! I am doing some different techniques and assays, which makes the work exciting and diverse. I work quite independently and feel confident in my work. I make some mistakes when I have to calculate stuff, or I find out halfway an experiment that I did not overthink something correctly, but nothing devastating so far. I do learn from my mistakes and I hope that will prevent me from making them again. Faulty equipment is a problem in the lab however, very frustrating pipettes that don't pipette the amount you want or that fall apart when using them... You really start to appreciate the modern Dutch labs, haha! The only criticism I have for now is that I feel like the whole project is already set out by my PI, and I would like to take it a step further as to get a feel of what a PhD is like. But this might still be possible once I have answered the obvious questions of the project first.

That's all for now! If you have any other questions about my work or my life I would love to hear. Happy to write it all! Do leave a comment, I love to hear from you guys.

Much love,