Minor in Innovative Molecular Diagnostics

Today I'm going to tell you a little bit od the minor I'm doing here, in The Netherlands.

As you can see on the headline, it is about diagnostics, which is a very prolific field in Leiden. It combines some molecular techniques from a prersepctive focus on set tests up to know if a patient (or a plant or whatever) is sick or not, as accurate as possible. I mean, the aim is to be able to detect all the people who suffer from a disease (not having false negatives, people who is sick but the test says they are healthy) and trying to not detect as a patient a healthy person (false positives). For this reason statistics are very important and we have to know how to use them. 

Here in The Netherlands, in contrast with Spain, you don't have all the sujcets during the week, but you have basically one subjects until it is finish, then a new one begin. This week we finished, almost, nucleic acids and diagnosis (NAD) by taking an exam last Tuesday. Next week Proteomics begin. One of the thing we have to do for NAD is to determine, in a case they give to us, if it was a outbreak and what is the source. It is amazing because they are actual cases so basically we are doing what is done in the real world. In the case of my group there is a little elephant suffering from a cutaneous infection and treated by 10 caretakers (possible source). Who will be the transmisor???

Besides this, we have also practical work in the laboratory. Some of the practices we did include isolation of antibodies using an HPLC and a western blot, a quick test to know if a blood sample come from a person suffering from sickle cell disease or a PCR based test to detect thalassemias.

If you like to know whta is done in this minor don't worry, I will tell you more in future posts.