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This guest post was contributed by Ally Huang is a 4th year PhD student at MIT.

While I had always enjoyed learning about biology in high school, it wasn’t until I started working in my first molecular biology lab in college that I really fell in love with it. Something about being able to actually hold all those seemingly abstract biological reactions that I learned about from textbooks just made everything click in my head and left me thinking: I wish I had this kind of experience earlier!

It was by serendipity that I got into the field of gene therapy, more specifically AAV-based retinal gene therapy. The year was 2001 and I started a job as a technician in a lab using adeno-associated viral vectors (AAVs) to treat an inherited retinal degenerative disease called Retinitis Pigmentosa. I quickly became fascinated by this emerging technology and its potential for the treatment of some genetic diseases.

Kinases: they regulate many proteins, with ~1/3 of human proteins predicted to be phosphorylated on at least one site. Phosphorylation is particularly important for regulating signal transduction and measuring kinase activity at the single-cell level can aid in drawing connections between signaling activity and cell phenotype. One method for monitoring live single-cell kinase activity is FRET, but FRET reporters are challenging to design and difficult to multiplex. The Covert Lab provides an alternative tool with their Kinase Translocation Reporters (KTRs) whose cellular localization serves as a proxy measurement of kinase activity. The key advantage of KTRs is that they are easy to create and simple to multiplex.

Viruses are intracellular parasites and natural vehicles for genetic information. Therefore they make excellent tools for genetic engineering. There are several different viral vectors to choose from, for example gamma-retrovirus, lentivirus, Adenovirus, and Adeno-associated virus (AAV). If you are wondering which virus fits you experiments best have a look at this viral vector overview.

This guest post was contributed by Nathan Sanders of ComSciCon, the Communicating Science Conference series for graduate students.

I believe that communication is the single most important skill that scientists need to succeed in their work. While it's not always recognized and valued for its immense importance, it may well be what determines whether you get the job after your next interview or whether your receive the next grant you apply for.

After all, the only value your work will have in the world is the value that you can succeed in communicating. Even the most rigorous, insightful, and novel scientific research will be wasted if you cannot convince others that it is important and relevant to them.