Reading Genetics Journals Is Hard

Obviously nobody should expect a 2nd year undergraduate genetics student who's barely finished his pre-major requirements to be able to read genetics journal with near the amount of proficiency of somebody who's actually in the field. I did think I could handle it though. So I sat down today and looked up some of the more popular journals in genetics (Genetics, American Journal of Human Genetics, Nature) and tried to look for some interesting articles to acquaint myself with.

I found that, with just the basic amount of knowledge gleaned through introductory courses and general interest on the side, that I basically had no idea what I was reading. I'm not sure if this speaks to any inadequacies in the teaching environment in today's undergraduate colleges, or whether I'm just not prepared to be reading these with any proficiency yet. I suspect it might be both.

What I did manage to understand was fairly interesting, and was found in the December issue of Genetics. The article was about population bottlenecking when a single HIV virus is introduced to a new host through sexual contact, and how it is contributed to by an initially strong CD8+ helper T Cell response that strongly selects for those HIV viruses that exhibit escape mutations in their antibody proteins called epitopes resulting in less Helper T Cell fixation to infected cells after an initially strong response.

I'm not sure how novel this research is, how important it is at this point in time, or even if I understood it correctly (perhaps one of my readers can tell me I'm horrendously wrong). But despite the fact that I feel like a 8 year old reading Descartes when I read these journals I still get pretty excited when (I think) I understand what I'm reading. It makes me excited for a future career publishing and reading these every day.

But really, somebody tell me if what I read means what I think it does.

P.S. Previous readers will note that I've changed the name of this blog to Oh. My. Genes. instead of Oh. My. Geek., this is because as I further my schooling I find that my interest in technology is waning and I read more about biology than I do tech and social media and the like. Cheers.