Greetings everyone!
This week’s schedule was a bit different given July 4th was a holiday. In the lab I spent time preparing for some upcoming RNAscopes by inducing seizures in mice and cryosectioning their brains. The morning BSURF meetings this week were dedicated to ‘chalk talks’ which are 8 minute presentations each fellow gives on their summer project.
One talk that I found very interesting was Erika Rispoli’s presentation on the relationship between environmental toxins and neural developmental disorders (NDDs). In the past few decades there has been a rapid increase in diagnosed NDDs and many patients with NDDs also experience sleep disorders. Erika’s work in the Bilbo lab seeks to study these trends and learn more about how sleep disorders are correlated with NDDs. After exposing pregnant mice to diesel exhaust particles and maternal stress, Erika then measures the sleep patterns of the pups, their depressive-like behavior using the forced swim test, and the activity of their astrocyte cells. I’m personally most excited to learn more about Erika’s astrocyte experiments since changes in their pruning activity in the brain during development has significant implications for NDDs.
