Hi everyone, I am Alexander Atamian (Alex for short) and I am going to be a second year biochemistry and molecular biology major at UCSB. I remember first being introduced to the C. elegan organism when I was in my biology high school class. Back in high school, I never thought that such a simple organism could have the capacity to be so complicated. I also never thought that I would even see this creature outside the textbooks let alone conduct research with them.

I was working in Dr. Rothman’s lab for about six months before I actually started conducting my own experiments. The amount of information that I had to absorb in that six months in order to start off on my own experiments seemed daunting at first. Knowing what genes and transcription factors that were specific to each part of the organism was the hardest part. It was toward the end of the six months when everything started to settle when I finally realized that I could make a significant impact on the overall project that the lab is working on. This project concerns the idea of transdifferentiation.

Transdifferentiation is defined as the switch of one cell type to another resulting in the loss of ones cellular characteristics and gain of the other. What we noticed was that when elt-7, a transcription factor specific to intestinal cells, was expressed throughout the organism, the pharyngeal cells of the organism turned into intestinal cells. This was very interesting because these cells did not have to go through a multipotent stage in order to switch into a different cell type. It was with this finding that led the lab to raise a slew of questions. These questions are the ones that are being undertaken by about 5 members of the Rothman lab.

When I was given the job of understanding the relationship between pha-4 and elt-7, I did all I could to get some background on the pha-4 gene. When I went online and tried searching for background information, I realized that what I am working on something that has not been undertaken in the past. This amazed me because I was trying to answer a question that not one graduate student, post doc, or professor knew. I am currently using a process called RNAi, which is when you knock down a certain gene and see its affect on the organism depending on what you fluorescently tag.

The first week mainly consisted of me organizing my entire schedule for the summer and trying to fully understand the experiments. Even though it started off slow, I am now in a position to go at a speed that can allow me to make significant progress and cannot wait to plow through and discover the unknown!