Category Archives: Intermediate stages of project

Intermediate Stage of Project: Project Outline

Here is the link to my project outline: project-outline

One lesson that I learned while working on my project outline was that dividing the work over the span of many days was an effective approach to completing a large assignment. My strategy to complete the project outline involved setting intermediate deadlines for each section so that when the deadline for the full outline approached, I was not overwhelmed with a lot of work. This strategy worked well for me and I plan to use this strategy again for future projects in other courses.

Intermediate Stage of Project: Updated Research Question

In a previous blog post (https://blogs.ubc.ca/lai463/2016/09/24/draft-research-question), I had shared a draft version of a research question that I was considering for the final project, which was the following:

“Are there genes that are expressed by the developing embryo that induce tolerance against the mother’s immune system?”

However, I later learned that my question had already been investigated. Therefore, I decided to create a new and original research question:

“Is chronic prenatal alcohol exposure sufficient to decrease production of IL-1β, IL-6, and TNF-α by alveolar macrophages in response to infection by Streptococcus pneumoniae during adulthood in mouse models?”

There are a few reasons why I chose this question:

Firstly, I wanted to propose an experiment that could increase our knowledge of the immune system. I am an Integrated Sciences student with immunology as one of my integrations, so I am interested in learning more about the immune system.

Secondly, as the course title of BIOL 463 is “Gene Regulation in Development”, I wanted my research question to relate to development by investigating how a particular treatment during an early stage of life can affect processes in the body later in life.

Thirdly, I was inspired to study the effect of alcohol exposure because I have experience as a research assistant performing alcohol experiments to investigate the effect of acute alcohol exposure on learning (link to a previous post where I interpreted data that I collected: https://blogs.ubc.ca/lai463/2016/11/02/unprompted-post-data-interpretation-outside-the-classroom/).

Finally, I designed my question to be very specific to ensure that my question has not yet been investigated. This is important to me because I want my project to allow the potential discovery of new information that no one has ever known. In my opinion, by investigating an original question, the outcomes of the investigations are more meaningful.

With my new and original research question, I look forward to completing the rest of my final project.

Intermediate Stage of Project: Draft Research Question

In conventional pregnancies, 50% of developing embryo’s DNA does not come from the mother. However, the mother’s immune system does not consider the embryo to be dangerous. Surrogate mothers have even less DNA in common with the developing embryo, yet surrogate mothers can still successfully bear children who are not their own.

Based on my interest in how developing embryos are not negatively affected by the mother’s immune system, I created a draft research question:

Are there genes that are expressed by the developing embryo that induce tolerance against the mother’s immune system?

However, I consider this question to be quite broad. Therefore, I will work towards narrowing it down to ask about a specific gene. In past immunology courses, I have learned that T regulatory cells in the immune system secrete inhibitory cytokines such as IL-10 and TGF-β that suppress immune cells in order to promote immune tolerance. For the final version of my research question, I will consider discussing whether IL-10 expression by the developing embryo is necessary for immune tolerance by the mother.

I am concerned that my question may have already been answered by other researchers, so an important challenge that I will have to overcome is to create a novel question that no one has answered yet.