Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Eleanor Demmons. I'm a junior here at Mount Holyoke. I'm a neuroscience major and an English minor. And this summer, I got to go to Ireland. It was really fun. And I worked in a genetics laboratory in Dublin City Center at Trinity College for a wonderful man named Matthew Campbell. And I also got to see a lot of Ireland. And I traveled to a few other places in Europe, which I'll talk about. So it was a very unique and special experience for me. And huge thanks to Lynn Cumming for allowing me to go. 

So this is me in the lab. 

[LAUGHTER] 

I just wanted to start with this picture for a few reasons. One of the most amazing things about my summer was that I worked with some fabulous people. Not only did I have an exceptional boss, but my other coworkers were absolutely wonderful. They were all quite a bit older than I was, all PhD students and beyond. So it was interesting for me to be kind of that, like, goofy 19 year old trying to fit in with these very well established adults. However, I did work in a European country, and everybody is pretty relaxed about life. So they were happy to kind of have my energy. And typically, in a bio lab like this, you should probably having a lab coat and some serious attire on, but we really didn't do that. 

[LAUGHTER] 

Not that that's a great idea, but that just kind of shows how happy we were. We were throwing away old computers this day, and it was very exciting. We were getting these print readers. 

So I just wanted to talk a little bit about what this lab focuses on. So this is an ocular genetics lab which deals with eyes, which is really cool. So Trinity College is a really big university, very different from Mount Holyoke. And they have an entire genetics department, which we only have a couple of different classes dedicated to that field of study. So that was really interesting for me to be in a lab with only nine people, but my department was, like, 150 people. So that was very different. 

And so our lab in particular was looking at age-related macular degeneration. And many of you may know someone in your life who is starting to have symptoms of this. A lot of our grandparents are experiencing partial AMD. One really good thing to know is that AMD, wet or dry form, does not completely blind a person because your peripheral vision remains intact throughout this disease. There also is a large genetic component. So you can imagine that in Ireland-- and I'll talk about this in a minute, this can be a really serious problem. 

So basically, what you're seeing in this picture is a lot of cloudiness in the middle of the eye. All of those lines are mostly just blood vessels, which you don't need to worry about. This kind of cloudiness makes it so that eventually, we almost have a visual hole where it's just black and kind of looking at nothing. And that's a huge bummer, obviously. And this is also caused by drusen buildup. And I'll talk about what makes that happen a little bit. 

And also, this happens in the macular region of our retina, and our retina is in the back of our eye. And the macula is really repsonsible for all of the little things that we do. And so once you can't do the little things, the bigger things become harder as well. 

So for someone who has lived their entire life being able to see perfectly fine, and then getting older and starting to have a little bit of trouble seeing things, that adjustment is really hard because you haven't lived your life going about your daily activities blind. So it really takes elderly folk out of their homes where they're independent and really happy and kind of bombs out their quality of life because they have to go into assisted living, which in Ireland is not as good as it is in the United States, and we don't even think it's very good here. 

The other reason that it's important to study this in Ireland and why this lab in particular is so dedicated to the research of AMD is that AMD accounts for 20% of all blindness in the world. But its prevalence in Ireland is-- and actually, this is another world statistic-- is 7.2% of people who are affected. And that's pretty large. And over a million people in Ireland-- there are over a million people in Ireland-- so many of them are also affected by AMD because it's a small gene pool. 

So 700,000 people in Ireland eventually have had AMD, and that was another statistic that my boss told me about. And also, just good to know that the life expectancy has risen significantly, and it's on the rise. So it's important to start to figure this out and how can we treat it. Because it's becoming more of an issue. 

So we were focused on a few different proteins that have a circadian rhythm component to them, just meaning that they come about in the morning and do different jobs, and then maybe they do different jobs later at night. So that was kind of interesting for us because we were working with mice, so we had to take different samples at different times of the day. 

And one of these proteins that the lab had already discovered, was really involved, with this protein called claudin-5, which is responsible for some of the cleaning that happens of the eye. So our eyes are exposed to toxins, wind, rain, heat, cold on a daily basis, and our lenses need to be cleaned and maintained in order for us to see all the time. 

So when these proteins that are responsible for this cleaning stop working, the dead lipids and these different toxins actually build up in the back of our retinas. And that's what causes these drusen components to solidify so that we have trouble seeing. 

Also what can happen is geographic atrophy, where we have nothing in the middle instead. So that's where the wet and dry form of this disease-- that's the differentiation there. So yeah, we were in lots of early mornings and lots of late nights. 

And this is just a teeny bit about the hypothesis. We were looking into tight junction proteins, which is what claudin-5 falls under. So I was doing lots of different laboratory techniques to just check out these proteins. Lots of small, molecular work, lots of pipetting. It was lot of stuff. And then I just had these little mices down at the bottom of the slide here to show you that I did do a lot of stuff with mice. And we did have to sacrifice them often. And that was sort of sad. However, they, you know-- for science. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So we had a really big mouse lab, and the smell was for reals. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So just a few things that I learned-- and this is just the laundry list of scientific exercises that I got to carry out, which was great. But I just really wanted to highlight a couple of things that I got to deal with. 

Fluorescent angiography, listed down near the bottom-- that's a certain type of imaging of the eye which is really complicated and hard to use. And it sometimes takes technicians almost two years to figure this out. And I got to learn in the summer because my boss was like, you need to know how to do this. It's so cool, and it's really hard, and we're going to do it. 

And I got to work with MRI machines, which yeah, we make them for mice. Weird, right? They're still huge, but that was really interesting. And then I also got to use a confocal microscope, which is a massive microscope that would probably take up a quarter of this entire room. And its laser, which is crazy. And if you break it, that's three million dollars that you just-- so, my boss said to me, he was like, Eleanor if you break this, I have to send you back to the States. 

[LAUGHTER] 

And I was like, OK, I won't break it! 

So just a couple of things to finish off that I really learned about myself. I was so independent this summer. I really had one really close friend, but a lot of buddies because I was young and as much as I was friends with my older co-workers, there's a little bit of a gap there. 

I learned how to be a better science kid, which is great. And I got to really take a lot of laboratory experience that I've gotten out here at Mount Holyoke and apply it and further it this summer. I felt like I really got to understand some of the techniques that I've been growing up knowing about. 

And I also-- yeah. So, you know, what to do when you're lonely? I really ran a lot. I watched some TV, but I also explored and that was really great. And just sort of a little outsider looking in component. I was living in an English speaking country, but I was still an outsider. And I had to be careful about saying I was from the States. 

[LAUGHTER] 

I'd get made fun of. It's just kind of interesting to be working so closely with something that was really to do with a disease that was not directly affecting the US as much as it was Ireland. So that's my summer. 

[APPLAUSE]