In the early morning of Jan 26th, we hurried from Taipei to Hsinchu to visit Food Industry Research and Development Institute(FIRDI). Under the guidance of senior researchers in the institute, we came to know the importance of microorganisms in food industry and the institute’s dedication to preserving biological resources in the past 50 years.

More importantly, we discussed with three experts, research scientist Guey-Yuh Liou, senior research scientist Hing-Yuen Chan, and associated research scientist Li-Wen Yu, ideas and topics we generated last year in hopes of diminishing the obstacles we were faced with. The experts thought through the ideas with us and suggested possible problems and potential market demands of the topics. With the help of the experts, we acquired numerous inspirations and new directions.

We are thankful for the help from the experts in FIRDI and Dr. Chou Tzu-Ho, who led this visit to the institute. What we have learned will continue to foster our ideas and projects.

After a long period of brainstorming, we have finally determined our topic to be curing hair loss. We figured that it might be a good idea to use follicle growing cycle as an index for success of hair loss prevention. We also hope to manipulate OCT in observing follicles so as not to harm the follicle as in biopsy.

We visited professor Wen-Chuan Kuo of National Yang-Ming University, Institute of Biophotonics. She kindly analyzed the pros and cons of OCT scan and showed great interest and support in our project. Although due to changes in our plan, it is unlikely that we will make use of OCT scan, we still appreciate Dr. Kuo a lot for her support.

Recently, CRISPR has appeared as a new technology for gene editing. Although it is powerful, the cost is also enormous. We wonder if CRISPR would be a useful tool in constructing a cell model for the selection of androgenetic alopecia drugs, which is our project direction. Hence, we invited professor Tsai-Yu Tzeng from National Yang-Ming University VYM Genome Research Center to discuss with us the techniques required for constructing the model. Professor Tzeng patiently explained the pros and cons of various techniques on gene editing, including CRISPR, virus infection, and others, enabling us to think further about what technique fits our need the best. “what you need is the fittest technology, not the hottest!” professor Tzeng reminded us.

We are thankful for professor Tzeng’s advices. They will help us make better decisions between economic concerns and technologies.

Thanks to our instructor Dr. Chou Tzu-Ho’s recommendation, we discussed our candidate topic of terminating the Red Imported Fire Ants(RIFAs) with professor Chin-Cheng Yang, whose profession is relevant to the topic, on April 13th. This is our first time to use the renovated dry lab area. We had a nice smooth table and lots of gecko stools with us.

We visited professor Yang in Kyoto through skype. He generously shared with us knowledge related to RIFAs. In the process, we gradually understood the possibilities and the obstacles in terminating RIFA. We broached many recent ideas and professor Yang also gave us an abundance of replies. For example, we learned that although RIFAs are invertebrates, keeping them in the lab still requires a higher biosafety level for that they are hard to wipe out. In Taiwan, there are only National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica that have the ability to keep artificially reproduced colonies, so they are quite difficult a subject to study. As a result, we had more insights into RIFA and we are also having a better view of future direction.

We are grateful for the help from professor Yang.

We visited Dr. Chih-Chiang Chen of Taipei Veterans General Hospital in the morning of May 4th to consult him on our recent topic of curing hair loss, in particular androgenetic alopecia. Dr. Chen is an expert in hair loss. He dedicates himself to not only curing androgenetic alopecia but also other types of hair loss.

The visit was very informative and helpful. Aside from providing information and answering our questions on androgenetic alopecia, Dr. Chen shared with us many novel ideas. Hence, we were able to understand our topic better and to produce new directions and ideas. For example, we realized that many limitations exist on the path to study human hair growth due to lack of mouse model and the difficulty in tissue culture. Yet, we also saw some possibilities in cell culture and will dedicate our path toward the direction.

Dr. Chen remained in contact with us after the interview and was eager to offer more help. We are very thankful for his contribution.

We learned a lot of hair-growth-related knowledge and yielded many thoughts from our last visit to Dr. Chih-Chiang Chen, who is an expert in hair loss and serves at Taipei Veterans General Hospital. Dr. Chen has been in contact with us since then. After simmering our thoughts for half a month, we decided that a second visit to Dr. Chen is necessary. Hence, we arranged another meeting with him on 23rd May.

This time, the scope of our discussion is more focused and specific. Dr. Chen gave us not only instructions on the cautions and feasibility of our new project but also suggestions on how to complete our project in what little time we still have. Under his instructions, we decided that our project would have multiple subprojects developed simultaneously in order to spread the risk and expand the content of the project.

As always, we are grateful for the help from Dr. Chen and we will do our best to complete our project.

In the afternoon of June 26th, we discussed our project with prof. Chao-Ling Yao through a video conference. Prof. Yao is an expert in stem cells and has conducted researches on dermal papilla cells in the previous years. Getting advice from prof. Yao would be very helpful to our project.

Prof. Yao gave us some insights into cell culture. This enables us, who are totally new to cell culture, to see possible limitations and problems in carrying out cell culture of the new species of cell line. He even generously offered us the option of using his lab’s resource in culturing the new cell line.

Thanks to prof. Yao, we learned a lot more about the materials for our project in this interview. This is going to assist us in refining our designation for future experiments.