Week 6

A concise, working summary of my summer project: Microglia are resident immune cells in the brain, and are necessary in establishment of normal neural circuitry, namely synapse formation and synapse refinement and elimination. Combinations of genetic predisposition and environmental factors,...

Hey readers! This week's blog post is a draft of my abstract for my summer project. With our poster presentation in less than two weeks, my projects are beginning to wrap up, so I wrote this draft to encapsulate the...

Drug addiction is do to neural systems that may be altered by different drugs. Similar drugs that can affect nicotine self admin can also affect opioid self-administration. One such drug is amitifadine. We have found a correlation between reduced remifentanil...

Curiosity, the desire for new information, has been shown to encourage exploration and benefit learning. While the relationship between curiosity and episodic memory seems intuitive, the present study examined this relationship with active engagement as a mediating variable. In this...

Place cells are a type of pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus that activate in a pattern that encodes for space as an animal moves through its environment. Our current project examines how the brain reacts to unexpected visual manipulations by...

Brachyury is a transcription factor that has been determined to be an essential component in the course of sea urchin embryonic development. We know that it is expressed at both the blastopore and stomodael opening of the embryo, but inactivates...

The neurobiological mechanisms of the visual system involves the primary visual cortex (V1) transmitting retinal input to multiple higher visual areas (HVAs) such as the posteromedial (PM) area. Each V1 or HVA neuron has a unique receptive field, or region...

Generating a library of mutant enzymes to degrade plastic As plastic pollution accumulates in the ocean, it becomes a growing threat to marine and human health. Ideonella sakaiensis is a recently discovered bacterium that digests polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the plastic...

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality among women. The majority of cases and resulting deaths occur in low-resource settings. Effective breast cancer treatment requires a detailed assessment of the tumor. Unfortunately, the lack of clinical infrastructure in...

Here is my drafted abstract for my poster, I can't wait to read about everyone's research and results! Male mice produce ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) during mating, but it is not known how inhaling the helium affects the USVs besides changing...

Parkinson’s Disease is a common neurodegenerative disease characterized by the death of dopaminergic neurons, which can be caused by oxidative stress in the mitochondria and subsequent DNA damage. It is known that the mutated variant of the LRRK2 gene causes...

The assembly of neural circuits is a highly complex process that has not yet been fully understood. The olfactory system of Drosophila offers an excellent model system to better understand this organization, as 50 classes of olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs)...

CTNND2 is an astrocyte-enriched Autism risk gene that encodes for the protein delta-catenin. Preliminary experiments revealed that knockdown of delta-catenin in astrocytes impairs astrocyte survival and decreases astrocyte processes both in vitro and in vivo. Astrocyte morphology coincides with synapse...

Although dystonia is the third most common movement disorder and causes muscles to contract uncontrollably, the exact mechanisms for dystonia are poorly understood. Past research on multiple forms of dystonia have implicated phospho-eIF2a pathway activity in the brain as a...

In Drosophila Melanogaster (fruit flies), wingless(wg) a Wnt growth factor responsible for cell to cell communication operates in two parts, a signal transduction and movement (of this signal) to other neighboring cells. What remains unclear to researchers who study wingless...

This week, I've prepared an early draft of the abstract for my poster: The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a cortical brain region implicated in a variety of functions, including emotional self-regulation and the reward pathway. This project utilizes optogenetic...

Inhibition of HipA to Reduce Multidrug Tolerance in E. coli The HipBA operon is a bacterial toxin-antitoxin module that plays a crucial role in multidrug tolerance in E. coli.  HipA, the toxin, is a kinase that functions by phosphorylating translation...