Statement Of Purpose Final

Carlos Siekavizza-Robles

Biological Sciences

It is true that the mentors that you have during your education and the relationships you develop with them will be influential in your decision of your future career. In my case, what I want is to become them. Rather say become like them. I want to become a mentor myself. When I declared my major, and when I started taking science classes when I was an undergraduate I was certain I wanted to be part of the process of research and discovery. There was no doubt about that, I did not want to go to medical or pharmacy school, I wanted to do research. But I did not know how I wanted to be part of doing scientific research. After all there are different ways in which you can join the scientific community.

Right now I my job is in one of those options; I am a lab

technician. However it was my relationship with my professors and my mentors the one that has made me find my future career goals. The experience of the educators, being able to share their own knowledge in the classroom and in the lab bench is what appeals me the most and what I find the most fascinating. Thus I pretend to go through graduate school and do research, be part of the process of scientific discovery. But I also want to become a professor to be part of the process of communication of knowledge to younger future scientists. Eventually I may also become part of the administration of an academic institution, where by nature of the institutions you need to be an educator first and foremost. My experience in research has had two different stages and coincidentally it corresponds to two different mentors, both of them professors. The first stage of my research experience I can qualify as the introduction to the world of research. I decided to join the laboratory of Michelle Hamm. I so enjoyed the experience that I remained in the lab for

two full years, well beyond the semester that my major required. With Dr. Hamm we designed my project: Studies on the effect of C8 steric bulk in the replication of 8-oxo-2’ deoxyguanosine (OdG) by different DNA polymerases. OdG is a mutation of the normal DNA base dG and it surges from the exposition to reactive oxygen species. Some DNA polymerases when replicating OdG prefer to incorporate dA instead of dC to make a base pair. This can lead mutations. The place in which OdG is different to dG has an atom that occupies a larger space than the normal space. Thus in my project I prepared DNA polymerase reactions where I used analogues of OdG with different sizes and see which different polymerases had a preference to incorporate dC or dA depending on the size of the analogue used. For the detection of this reactions we used radioactively labeled DNA. During the time in which I worked in this project we discovered that in many DNA polymerases it is the size of the space of the mutation the one that created the preference to incorporate dA instead of dC. The data of this project is still being produced and hopefully it will be published soon. That is why I called this stage of my research experience an introduction because despite of working in the lab to summers full time, the nature of being an undergraduate did not allow me to be in the laboratory for longer.

However, here I learned how to purify DNA via gel electrophoresis.

Gel

electrophoresis was as a matter of fact the technique in which I became most handy at since our results would be shown through this technique. I also had the privilege of being able to make my own gels, which nowadays is a technique that many do not get to do. I used the software Image Quant to determine the Michaelis-Menten kinetics of the DNA polymerase reactions. As an introductory phase to research I got to do very exciting things.

I got to present my data to the wider community both in student research

symposiums at my university but also at my first conference, the 59th South Eastern Regional Conference of the American Chemical Society in a poster session. My second stage of research experience is where I am now and which I consider a more mature stage. It is this stage the one that has confirmed my will to go to graduate school and eventually become a professor. I am a laboratory technician at the laboratory of Anthony Nicola at the Virginia Commonwealth University.

Here we research how

Herpes Simplex Virus enters into cells. This lab has introduced me to cell culture and growing viruses, which is an essential activity in our research activities. Here I have had the first paper where I have been published in the Journal of Virology. The title is Herpes simplex virus tegument ICP0 is capsid-associated and its E3 ubiquitin ligase domain is important for incorporation into virions.

Here I was responsible for

characterizing the protein composition of wild type virus and virus containing mutants of the protein ICP0. This was done via SDS-PAGE and Coomassie staining. Currently I work on finding if changes in pH change a glycoprotein in the virus strain ANGpath that fuses with the cells’ membrane more readily than wild type virus. I also investigate the role of cellular cholesterol in allowing this fusion to happen. I perform these projects through western and dot blots. I call this experience more mature because I have learned to be more detailed in keeping records and making figures. However my position as a lab technician has given me experiences that sometimes not even graduate students get to do but professors and PIs have to do. I am in charge of ordering our laboratory’s scientific supplies, giving maintenance to much of our lab equipment and administrate the spending of some of the money coming from grants. This more administrative side of research is little explored and I think I have gained great advantage by doing it. I also have been

able to witness the relationship of a professor to his graduate students and the mentorship that he gives. My experience with great mentors goes beyond my these two research advisors, by having had a class in immunology with a great professor my curiosity for this field grew immensely. As a matter of fact microbiology and immunology are the areas that interest me the most, I work in such area now. I am fascinated by how the immune system recognizes pathogens and the complex receptors that immune cells have developed. I also interested how pathogens sequester the immune system and the cell’s protein factory. These areas interest me so much that I would like to do some research in them. Through my experience in the laboratory both in undergraduate and now as a technician I believe that I am a very fit candidate for graduate school. Even when I decided not to go to graduate school right after graduating, I decided to stay within the scientific field. This actually I believe came to my advantage as I gained more research experience and was exposed to more aspects of the life of academics.