Since before Wabash, I always knew I had an interest in science especially Biology and Chemistry. However, I have not had many chances to put my knowledge in Chemistry into a lab setting until now. This summer, I worked at an internship for a small biotechnology company called Perfinity Bioscience.
The focus of this internship was to test different enzymes and their ability to digest proteins and formalin fixed tissues. Enzymes are a type of protein that cuts proteins at specific sites. Formalin fixed tissues are tissues that have had formaldehyde added to it which causes cross linking between proteins and RNA, proteins and other proteins, and proteins and DNA. This crosslinking makes it far harder for enzymes to digest; therefore, a lot of the work I was doing was figuring out how to get the enzymes to digest crosslinked tissue. These enzymes are specifically used only for research and sold to different universities.
My job for this company was to run different types of experiments using these enzymes to see what conditions they would work at. This would consist of me reading literature on the topic. Then, I would use this literature and help from my more experienced coworkers to design an experiment for the following day. After this, I would run the experiment and record the results on
excel and repeat the process. I also got to learn how the products are packed and sold to follow government guidelines. I also got to use new technology in these experiments that I have not used before such as HPLC, and I got to see how an LC-MS works.
Overall, I greatly enjoyed and am grateful for this experience at Perfinity with especially loving the freedom I was given to test certain experiments I wanted to do with the enzymes. I believe this internship has shown me how interesting science can be and revived my goal of going to graduate school for a field in science. This internship has also greatly prepared me to go into
industry by showing me the private industry side of science with understanding costs, packaging, and other economics based problems that private companies have to face rather than academia.
