Maybe I didn't choose cholesterol, but it chose me

Put simply, I didn’t. Unlike the grey wolf, for me, cholesterol has never really sparked joy. I just can’t get excited about sterols and organic chemistry and metabolism. As an undergrad I chose genetics as my major. In lectures I was excited about DNA, and how it cleverly encodes proteins, but with just a tiny change it can ruin everything. With this in mind, I considered the Honours projects on offer. I was really interested in a project that (from memory) was looking for disease-causing genes in dogs (supervised by the late Alan Wilton). There was a project looking at links between cholesterol and cancer (Cancer! That’s such a big thing! Sounds great!). Another project looking at how to target cancer. Something about evolution of bacteria. So many exciting projects! I talked to the prospective supervisors – though I didn’t manage to talk to one as they were difficult to find in their office when I dropped in – I reasoned that this would not be useful in an Honours supervisor and reluctantly excluded them. 

I ended up choosing the “cholesterol and cancer” project and thereby joined a cholesterol lab but without actually needing to do anything very cholesterol-related. My Honours and PhD were about phosphorylation and ER-to-Golgi transport. I’ve still mostly managed to avoid serious sterol business – I’m not keen on radioactive work, and when we switched this work to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), I still wasn’t excited about it. I’ve done only small amounts of measuring sterols, and have never done a cholesterol assay – which is a little bit awkward when someone asks me, as a member of the “cholesterol lab,” whether I can give them advice on their cholesterol assay. Nope, sorry!

So, what does excite me? Here I need to thank a past PhD student who prompted me to really think about this question – what am I most interested in researching? After some thinking and discussing I narrowed it down to the idea that I like sequences – I like working out which particular nucleotides or amino acids cause some effect. E.g., I really enjoyed the phosphorylation work I did in my PhD where we tried to find the phosphorylated residues on a protein, and I’ve liked our transcriptional papers where we located the sterol-response elements in promoters of genes. These are the things that get me excited and keep me interested. 

This doesn’t mean that I *dislike* cholesterol, it just isn’t my major interest. I like the protein degradation and gene regulation work that’s happening in the lab at the moment. These proteins and genes are regulated by cholesterol and that is why we’re interested in them. 

Why is it important to think about what you’re interested in? Well, it helps to know what you want to work on when negotiating what project(s) will be yours – sometimes there’s some wiggle room, sometimes there isn’t. But I invariably find that projects I’m really interested in tend to go better than others, both progressing faster and being more pleasant for all involved. I also imagine it would help in choosing a future lab if you have at least some idea about what you’re interested in. I think this can also extend to what types of experiments you like doing – e.g. I really wouldn’t like to do mouse or animal work, so would try to avoid this. I’d encourage everyone to think about what they are interested in and try to do as much of it as possible. 

Maybe I didn’t choose cholesterol, but it chose me…?

Dr. Laura Sharpe (@laurajsharpey) is a postdoctoral researcher at Brown Lab UNSW. This story was published on February 13, 2019, on Confessions of the Brown Lab Researchers (available here), and has been republished here with permission.