I'm so excited. I met with a biochem professor today about working in her lab. As it turns out, she's just starting a new project with hepatitis C RNA and needed a 4th undergrad in her lab, so my timing was perfect! I'll officially be a lab rat (that's how the faculty refers to the student researchers) on October 19!
Basically what the "problem" is is that hepatitis C RNA dimerizes (eh, the bases get stuck together in pairs and form kink) rather often, leading to lots and lots of mutations. So all that genetic variability means #1: nobody has quite the same form so a vaccine, which would be against only one to a few forms, would be useless and #2: it keeps changing anyhow, so any treatment or vaccine is going to become obsolete. So the project I'll be working on is trying to figure out what causes it to dimerize so then perhaps someone can figure out how to stop that.
Also exciting, she generally keeps people in the lab until they graduate so I'm pretty much set and starting next semester, I should be able to get credits for working there. And even better! She likes to have you work during the summer too but not necessarily through the Undergraduate Research Program, which is very good for me since I don't want to do URP since I wouldn't get the time off for camp. She has no problem giving me that week off, hurrah! And oh yeah, you get paid... a lot.
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