La Trobe University students are catching up on their laboratory work after the last few COVID-disrupted years, with the budding scientists working on four weeklong projects.
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Dr Donna Whelan, the Holsworth Biomedical Research Initiative director at the university said the 18 participants had been significantly interrupted by the pandemic.
"(They) haven't been in the lab very much for two years so we thought we can bring up people from Bundoora (another La Trobe campus) and we can get them doing research in our labs," she said.
"I think they're getting a feel for real world lab work, whether it's research or industry, insofar as it is not guaranteed to work, it's not all laid out for you.
"You don't come in and mix things together and get the result, which is what practicals are meant to be.
"It's a good skill set to have, whether they stay in research or not, and it's also a good test of whether that might be good pathway to pursue."
Dr Whelan said the work the students are doing is more troubleshooting, working around problems and designing research.
The four studies are respectively focused on chemotherapeutic drugs and seeing how they interact with DNA replication, the mechanism of drugs which affect microtubules (part of the cytoskeleton or cell bones), the presence of balls of fat in cells as part of an antiviral response, and the different levels of specific proteins in different muscle types and how this impacts performance.
Students will get the chance to do work in the cell culture lab, work with centrifuges, microscopes and lasers and visualise diseases.
The students will then present their findings in Bundoora at the end of the program.
The program is generously funded by the Holsworth Biomedical Research Initiative and Dr Whelan said without that financial support the university could not run the training.
The hope is that this exposure to research will get more people interested in purchasing lab-work and research and finding answers to some hugely important questions.
Dr Whelan herself has the broad research area of DNA damage. She works in the university's cell culture lab growing five or six different types of cancer cells in petri dishes and conducts experiment to examine their growth.
"Every single one [cancer], something goes wrong when DNA is damaged, and then not repaired correctly," Dr Whelan said.
"So we know a few of the most important proteins that we work with are things like BRCA1 and BRCA2, which are really kind of prevalent in pop culture now because if you have mutations in them you are way more likely to get breast cancer or ovarian cancer.
"We can actually see what healthy versions of these proteins are doing inside cells, but we can also see when they do have these mutations, what kind of goes wrong?"
All the research that takes place in the labs in Bendigo and across other La Trobe campuses then has the potential to go into the next sphere of research where scientists can target things with drugs and prevent cancer development.
The aim is to identify that science and then put it out into the research community who can continue working on it.
Students Elahndra Ilijevski, Sreeya Goud Kalagotta, Louis Hocking, Jamieson Ayton and Will Belmont were some of the students taking part and they were especially keen to involved in real-world research.
"It's nice to be back in the lab - with COVID we weren't able to experience much of this and the opportunity of Donna just allowing us to go in and see the microscope she's built is amazing," Elahndra said.
We'd never get to do this without this program," Louis said.
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