This past week I was given a glimpse into all of the exciting things that my peers in the HHRF program are doing in their labs this summer. I thought everyone was doing really interesting things. From Ecoli conjugation to the ability of cryptococcos neoformans to survive in humans. Everyone is engaged in really novel work with profound implications. One chalk talk that really captured my interest was Christin’s. She works in a lab that looks at heart regeneration. As it turns out, certain animals have hearts that can reconstruct themselves when a piece of it is damaged. However it doesn’t seem that humans have this ability or at least cannot carry it out nearly as efficiently.
Cardiomyopathy is the leading cause of death, but if we could enhance our hearts ability to recover after an attack, then many lives could be saved. The immediate and widespread implications of this work being done in her lab are what sparked my interests. Her lab believes they can trace this regenerability back to a single protein-GDF11-which they saw was expressed in Zebrafish.
I think Christin’s work is interesting because it revolves around better understanding this protein. She gets to figure out where GDF11 is located within the body, see what happens in Zebrafish when it is blocked and then reintroduced. The implications of her work are mesmerizing and this made her talk all the more interesting.
