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Paige Gruenke #IAmScience
Paige Gruenke, a Ph.D candidate in Dr. Donald Burke’s lab in Bond LSC. | Photo by Mary Jane Rogers, Bond LSC
By Mary Jane Rogers | Bond LSC
“#IAmScience because I am fascinated by life on a molecular level and inspired that my research could positively impact medicine.”
As a graduate student in Donald Burke’s lab at Bond LSC, Paige Gruenke explores the role of ribonucleic acid, or RNA. That means her work involves a lot of test tubes. She looks at how specialized RNA molecules, called aptamers, bind tightly and specifically to proteins from HIV to prevent the virus from replicating. Her job is to locate the aptamers that bind to HIV proteins from a very large starting pool of RNA sequences by doing repeated cycles of removing the sequences that don’t bind and keeping the ones that do, until the strong binders dominate the population.
“A lot of the things I do don’t sound very exciting,” said Gruenke. “It’s throwing components into tubes and waiting for things to happen. It might sound mundane, but it’s all for the greater good.”
Gruenke hopes that her research will give scientists a better understanding of HIV, because understanding the virus will lead to better drug treatments and eventually, a cure. She is finishing up her second year as a Ph.D candidate in biochemistry, and plans to graduate by summer 2020. Gruenke has always been interested in the area of molecular medicine, but she has some advice for students who are just getting started.
“On a day to day basis, many experiments fail,” said Gruenke. “You’re always going to be learning something you didn’t know before. So, don’t be disheartened because something didn’t work out — just keep trying. Because whenever you have an ‘Aha!’ moment, it makes it all worthwhile.”