Hello dear readers!!
This summer I’m very excited to be reporting on my experiences researching epilepsy with the McNamara Lab. I’ve actually been working in this lab since November 2022 as an undergraduate intern, and have loved taking a hands-on approach to exploring neuroscience as it’s one of my favorite branches of biology!
To elaborate more upon what my lab hopes to achieve with its research, it’s been established that seizures themselves can be a cause of epileptogenesis, a phenomenon attributed to the BDNF receptor tyrosine kinase, or TrkB. Unexpectedly, it has also been discovered that briefly inhibiting the binding of BDNF and TrkB caused epileptogenesis to not only stop but actually regress, but this only occurs when the binding is inhibited following a seizure. Given this new proposal that seizures can also be protective against epileptogenesis, my project will consist of investigating the mechanisms behind these protective pathways, and my job will shift towards applying in situ hybridization to measure the expression of relevant mRNA sequences in hippocampal neurons.
From this summer research experience I’m not only hoping to acquire additional technical lab skills such as RNAScope through my project, but I’m also excited for the collaboration that will occur in the lab with mentors and through the program’s faculty seminars and professional development workshops. This program will teach me more about conducting research and then presenting my findings in a way that’s communicable to a wider audience through the final research showcase.
My responsibilities from last semester have consisted of digesting mice tails to extract DNA, running PCR gels to genotype the different lines of mice used in a variety of experiments, and cryosectioning mice brains for analysis. As for my first week back on the job, I’ve split my time between reading up on this new branch of epilepsy research I’m about to undertake, organizing the tails in the freezer that have accumulated in the month I’ve been gone, continuing to run a few PCRs and gels, and I’ve begun to play around with ImageJ to develop a protocol we can use to analyze the results of our in situ hybridizations. Finally, this Thursday there was a cute Farmer’s Market at the Medicine Pavilion Greenway where I bought some flowers, and we got to have a lovely lunch with the whole lab on Friday!
Thanks for stopping by my blog!
Until next week,
Emma Podol
