My time here in Singapore is rapidly coming to an end. Today it is only two weeks until my flight home, which means that I’m spending a lot of hours in the lab in order to get the last pieces of the puzzle for my project. During my stay here in Singapore I have had the opportunity to participate in various different events and go to a lot of interesting lectures. This week for instance I have been to the NNI research day, where there were some interesting talks about clinical research and how to facilitate research for clinicians as well as an interactive poster session where results from clinical research, basic science and translational research were presented. Worth mentioning is that one of the members of my lab received a commendation award with the title “Best Junior Researcher” for her abstract.

I also went to a very interesting lecture given by Professor R. Manjunatha Kini with the title “Toxins are not villans but unsung heroes: Fascinating future in toxin research”. In his lecture, Professor Manjunatha Kini explained that even though toxins from venoms often are associated with death and debilitation, these compounds have contributed more to improving our lives than they cause deaths. For instance, these substances have the potential to be used as therapeutic agents or for diagnostic purposes. In his laboratory, the approach to solve various health related issues has been to focus on characterizing new toxins, understanding its function and identify possible medical applications as opposed to the traditional approach in the pharma industry where the target is first identified to then search for a compound that can act as a key to the lock.

To increase the awareness of Parkinson’s disease, my host-lab and I participated in an event called “Move to beat Parkinson’s” earlier today. To all of you readers that had been joking about the fly mascot costume that they have in the lab – today it happened. I was the fly mascot. Even though many people did ask me if I was one of the Avengers or a butterfly and that the costume was crazy warm, it was a lot of fun to explain to the public about what is done within Parkinson-research and what is known to be protective at the moment.

On Friday next week I am to present my results to the group and show them what I have done during my time in their lab. It almost feels unreal that I’m almost done with this master, but I still have a lot of studying to do before the graduation ceremony the 5^th of June. Next time I post something on this blog I will hopefully have finished collecting data and be more or less done with the thesis. See you then!

//Paulina