Explaining my research: the video version

Hi all, I recently submitted a video explaining my research in 3 minutes or less for a UC Davis competition. Not winning any awards with this one, but I wanted to share here as it was inspired by my recent “explaining my research” posts. Check it out and let me know what you think! Any critiques are welcome :) Transcript included below as well if you’re interested.

What if I told you that you had an army running through your veins? This sounds maybe unrealistically epic, but it also happens to be true, in a sense.

Say you're biking along and you fall, not that it happens to me… well, okay, maybe it does, but you fall and you scratch your knee. Now, this can be a problem, because it can provide a potential entry point for dangerous pathogens like bacteria or fungi or viruses. Luckily, we've evolved to be able to handle this situation. In a lot of cases, you'll have cells that send out distress signals to your body and call in this army that I was mentioning at the beginning.

The foot soldiers of this army are cells called neutrophils and those are the ones I focus on. They're really good at flooding in and chasing after and destroying these enemy pathogens. They do this by grabbing onto the pathogens, eating them, and dumping toxic chemicals on them. This is a remarkable process and it's really close to home, it's right at our fingertips, literally - if I were to pick my finger and look at the drop of blood under the microscope I should find over 100,000 of these cells ready to go.

I’ve been fascinated by these experiments that I do from from the start. If you see these images, they’re remarkable. What we do is we hold these cells in glass micropipettes, which are these tiny little glass straws. We also use these to hold a pathogenic particle.

We watch the cell respond to the particle and eventually eat it, and this happens in a matter of minutes. If you just look at this, you start to wonder: how in the world could the cell accomplish this?

I mean, just imagine for a second that you are tasked with building a machine this small capable of these tasks. They're really small I mean this bar here is one 10th of the width of a strand of hair, so if we scale everything, a strand of hair would be the width of this entire slide.

But nature has managed to design these machines. And when we think of machines, we also think of having controls like on and off switches or dials. And this is true for cells as well, where these signals and controls are often chemical in nature. I'm focused on particularly one of these chemical signals, which is calcium concentration inside the cell.

That's what you see in these green images - when the cell is brighter there's a higher calcium concentration. And what you'll notice in this one sequence is that when the cell starts eating, we see a much higher calcium concentration. And so you could possibly think of the calcium as maybe a sort of on switch or a dial telling the cell to get a move on and speed up and consume the pathogen.

Now, we don't know exactly what the calcium triggers within the cell and why this is important for the process of the cell eating.

If we're able to answer fundamental questions like this, we could solve problems when things go wrong in the immune system or maybe we could even tell the cells to not only attack pathogens, but also things like cancer cells.

The options are really endless and I'm excited to see where this can take us.