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Amy Smith
Staff Research Associate
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I grew up Sonoma County, in the very small and very weird town of Forestville, which is located in one of the many coastal valleys of Northern
California. I attended the University of California at Davis for many years, and was eventually awarded a BS in Microbiology, somewhere in the
neighborhood of 1999. However, my degree emphasized medical microbiology, and subsequently I have very little training in plant pathology or
fungal microbiology. I have, however, a very broad expertise in most basic lab applications and techniques, thanks to my work done both as a
student and as an employee of UCD.
In the summer of '99 I was hired to the laboratory of Dr. Stephen Barthold of the Center for Comparative Medicine at UCD. Dr. Barthold's research
at the time revolved around studing Lyme disease in a well-established mouse model, as well as other mouse models of human and lab-animal diseases.
In two years I served as a technician to several investigators of Barthold's lab, performing a variety of common techniques in the fields of
Immunology, Epidemiology, Genomics, Proteonomics, Pathology and Microbiology. After the first year of assisting with in-vivo studies, I switched to
a less mouse-invasive position within the lab, performing instead more molecular techniques to screen a genomic library of Helicobacter bilis
also a spirochete), in order to generate recombined antigenic proteins to establish a diagnostic assay for mouse colony overseers. H. bilis
is a common pathogen in mouse breeding colonies, and infections may affect the research outcomes using these mice. Therefore, it is important to
develop better diagnostic assays to detect the infection in a timely and inexpensive manner.
I made the decision in the spring of 2001 to finally leave Davis and move to the Bay Area, and simultaneously I wanted to try switching fields, to
something more environmentally-focused, but still anchored in molecular biology. I had just about given up ever finding such a thing until Matteo
contacted me in December 2001. Now, I am "sorta like" the manager of Matteo's lab. I help people find things (very important at this stage of the lab),
buy things, order things, clean things and put things away; I also field a lot of the phone calls, keep track of where all the lab members are, keep
members updated on changes within the lab (also very important at this time) and help to resolve the daily crisis (or sometimes, crises). I am one
of the chief contacts of the lab: I interact with representatives from scientific suppliers and companies through whom we purchase and maintain
instruments, as well as with Cal administrative staff. More importantly, however, I operate and maintain "Pinky", our ABI3100, a Genetic Analyzer
from Applied Biosystems. While I don't directly generate much data in the lab, Pinky is a delicate and critical instrument to lab output, and keeping
it in working order is often a very difficult job.
When a person has discovered the truth about something and has established it with great effort, then, on viewing his discoveries more
carefully, he often realizes that what he has taken such pains to find might have been perceived with the greatest ease. For truth has the
property that it is not so deeply concealed as many have thought… Yet it often happens that we do not see what is near at hand and clear.
And we have a clear example of this right before us. For everything that was demonstrated and explained above so laboriously, is shown to us
by Nature so openly and clearly that nothing could be plainer or more obvious.
…Galileo
Why on earth "Pinky"??
We have (only somewhat-affectionately) named the Genetic Analyzer 'Pinky', after our lab mascot, a pink flamingo beanie baby. In
January of 2002, Matteo invited the lab out for an evening in San Francisco, and at one bar a member of our party won a door prize,
this hideous hot pink flamingo toy (which, like cabbage patch dolls, come named). Matteo made the delicate suggestion that the bird
should be donated to the lab, and the winner obliged, so now Pinky sits atop the GA, watching over our sequences with heavenly grace and love.
After Hours
Outside of the lab I like to spend my time visiting friends, drinking wine, camping, hiking, listening to music, stargazing, cooking, reading, and all those other good healthy hobbies. Realistically, though, most of my time is delegated to doing laundry.
Publications
- Feng, Sunlian; Hodzic, Emir; Kendall, Lon V.; Smith, Amy; Freet, Kimberly; Barthold, Stephen W.. Cloning and expression of a Helicobacter
bilis immunoreactive protein. In: Clinical and Diagnostic Laboratory Immunology May, 2002. 9 (3): 627-632.
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