“I’m working in a cancer immunology research lab at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. There are 7 people, a mix of grad students, post-docs, and lab techs including myself who work in the lab under the principal investigator Dr. Lustgarten. Everyone has their own experiments and research to do but my project in particular has to do with the aging immune system and how that contributes to the elderly being more susceptible to cancer. ‘Immunosenescence’ is the term used for the natural aging of the immune system. There is a clear age-related risk in cancer incidence thus much attention has recently been given to determining what changes occur in the aging immune system that leads to this increased susceptibility to cancerous cells, and how we can target those immune irregularities in a strategy for primary cancer prevention. A very important tool used in scientific research is the microarray (more information can be found here & here). In short, this technology allows us to sample the expression of tens of thousands of genes at once. What this means is that the time to actually perform the experiment’s laboratory steps has been significantly reduced, but the huge amounts of data recorded still must be analyzed. We isolated RNA from CD4+ and CD8+ T cells from both young and old mice injected with tumors, and then used those samples for DNA microarray analysis. What we have now is a huge dataset containing values for the up-/down-regulation of over 40,000 genes in CD8+/CD4+ memory/naïve cells from both young and old mice at 5 different times (0, 4, 12, 24, and 72 hours). My job right now is to analyze this data using a very helpful statistical software and find genes/patterns of genes which could be significant and require further investigation. If you’d like to learn more about this topic here is a link to an excellent review paper ‘The role of immunity in elderly cancer’ (here).”