Chalk Talk Reflection

This week all of the fellows had an opportunity to share about our projects.  It was awesome to see the diversity of research projects everyone is working on.  Yillin’s project especially piqued my interest. The broad idea of her research is to understand if mutations of the Shank2 gene plays a role in bipolar disorder. Another gene in the Shank family, Shank3, has previously been found to play a key role in bipolar disorder, as well as multiple other neurological disorders.  However, little work has been done to look at the role of Shank2. This project is particularly interesting because of its clear application to human health and the understanding of bipolar disorder. It is also slightly related to my work, although really only in the fact that both of our research involves illnesses related to the brain, mine with addiction and Yillin’s with bipolar disorder.   It was also intriguing to see how her project is almost the reverse of mine. She started with wet lab procedures, running PCR on human samples, and then will transition to computational analysis after,and I started with computational techniques and now am beginning to shift to more wet lab methods.  Being in a lab that looks at the relationship between epigenetics and transcriptional mechanisms makes me skeptical that bipolar disorder is simply caused by a genetic mutation.  Epigenetics play a very important role in changing gene expression, so I think it’s possible that an epigenetic change is also involved in causing bipolar disorder. The implications of this project are fascinating, partially because of the obvious possibilities that this project holds for potential bipolar treatments, but also because this knowledge might alter the public’s view of certain mental disorders and reduce some of the stigma that exists.  I look forward to hearing about what Yillin finds with regards to the role of Shank2 in bipolar disorder.