Short Study Tour

So thursday morning I got on a bus and drove off into the snowy abyss of Denmark. After about two hours of sleeping we arrived at our first destination in the city of Odense. We had a lecture and tour at the Medical Biotechnology Center at Syddansk University (Southern Denmark U).

This part is for the nerds...

The lecture focused on a protein found in the surfactant of the lung. The protein is called SP-D and is made up of a long weave of three collagen strands that is capped with a protein that is a trimer. The protein was thought to only be involved in recognizing the specially glycolized proteins on the surface of bacteria. This would then signal to phagocytotic cells and produce an immune response. When a knockout mouse was made, the mice had an increased risk of infection and an increased level of lipid build up in the lungs. They then found that SP-D was expressed in the epethelial cells of the circulatory system. So they devised a new hypothesis stating that the mice would have an increased risk of arthosclerosis when SP-D was not present. After running a study with mice on a high fat diet they concluded the opposite. SP-D knockouts had a lowered the risk of arthrosclerosis and also gained a large amount of weight. They realized that the two forms of SP-D, a tetramer on the cell surface and a extracellular monomer, regulated the rate of arthrosclerosis and lipid accumulation. So ultimately they developed a mouse model that would get fat but not develop arthrosclerosis.

Here is a picture of the lobby. Everything in the building was brand new and had about 7 groups working on every topic you can think of, from cancer to psychiatric drugs

We then had lunch and got back on the bus to visit another part of the University. Jesper Wengel presented his new and exciting discoveries about Lock Nucleic Acids (LNA) and Unlocked Nucleic Acids (UNA). This technology is directed at gene therapies and either locks, by adding an ether bridge on the sugar backbone of DNA, or unlocks, a ring opening of the sugar, to produce novel drugs. This lecture was interesting because it blended an enormous amount of chemistry with biology. We then had a tour of the facility and then drove to the hostel.

The middle is a rotovap that uses acetone and dry ice to help condense, pretty cold. The facilities are a prime example of danish design (top). The bottom picture is from the balcony of our room at the hostel. All the guys in my program stayed in the same hostel room which was quite big plus we had a awesome balcony. From the hostel we started to explore the town. I saw where Hans Christian Anderson was born and some cool statues. We then met for dinner at a nice danish restaurant and had all the food we wanted on the study programs tab. We then walked to the Orchestra. This was the first Orchestra I had ever seen and I would highly recommend going at least once in your life. The first piece was the danish composer Carl Neilson and depicted the movement of the sun across the sky. The second piece was written by a japanese composer to illustrate the constellations and mystical gods. It also had a guest appearance by a crazy drummer that took out his anger on a set of asian drums for about a half hour. The last piece was a long piece from another composer that I cant remember. All together the show was crazy cool. The strings section was only about 5 yards from our seats and we could see the hairs in the bows break because of how violently they were playing. Afterwards our program went to a little irish pub with cool decorations and drank a few beer. My favorite cheap beer was something called Tiger. It finished sweet and plus I came up with a good tagline to go with it, "Drink Tiger, RARRR!" Great night.