Second week of BSURF done and honestly, I am not 100% sure what it is that my summer project consists of yet. I know the general gist of what it is and the purpose of doing it so here goes my little elevator speech about it: Our goal is to study a protein that has been found to alleviate neuropathy induced pain when administered in animal models more in depth. Neuropathy refers to nerve damage usually caused by disease or injury. Chronic nerve pain is a problem because common medicine like Ibuprofen, Advil, or even opioids are not effective in this case as they work in a different manner that does not target the root problems of nerve pain.
Immunohistochemistry (IHC) will be used extensively in order to visualize our protein of interest’s receptors within DRG neurons. To do this, the slide with the tissues of interest is prepared with a washing buffer first, then stained with a primary antibody which is what binds to the receptor of interest. The slides are left in the cold room overnight and the following day they are again stained with a secondary antibody which binds to the primary antibody that was previously added. It is this secondary antibody that becomes fluorescent under the microscope and allows us to see if and where our receptors of interest are in the samples we are looking at.
This will be done with the hopes of better understanding how our protein of interest works when said protein is administered to an organism and alleviates pain to determine if it could potentially be applied the same way in humans. In preparation to carry out this project, I have been receiving training in the proper handling of the animals in our lab, how to do behavior tests, prepare slides with tissue samples, and learning how to do the IHC protocol needed. I’m very excited to see how this project evolves and see the data we collect in the following weeks.
