Tony Kim
Fatty liver disease is a global burden for public health, and is commonly associated with obesity and type-2 diabetes. Fatty liver mainly results from an impaired lipid metabolism in livers, showing reduced fatty acid oxidation and ketogenesis. However, the exact mechanism behind this phenomenon is not well understood. Our body begins producing ketone bodies by breaking down fatty acids during extended fasting, which are used as a substitute for glucose. However, one problem with studying ketogenesis is that ketogenesis is not well observed in hepatocytes isolated from an organism. A […]
Seul Ah Lee
Animals, including humans, form associations between rewards and cues that predict them through the process of cue-reward learning (CRL). CRL has long served as an advantageous tool in evolution for acquisition of rewards such as food and mating. However, CRL can also be maladaptive in disorders such as addiction, wherein drug-associated cues drive compulsive drug-seeking behavior and relapse. Past and recent studies have found that CRL largely depends on cue-reward contingency, or how much the occurrence of rewards depends on the occurrence of cues. CRL is attenuated when contingency is […]
Kevin Li
Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) is a key epigenetic regulator complex that acts as a gene silencer to maintain cell identity, depositing the repressive histone H3 K27 trimethylation mark at target genes. Faulty PRC2 regulation is involved in developmental disorders and cancer development, but mechanisms that direct PRC2 activity to target genes are poorly understood. Recent structural findings show PRC2 binding through its catalytic lobe, but do not provide a mechanism to explain how PRC2 localizes to target sites in vitro without its catalytic lobe. To address this knowledge gap, […]
Viktoriya Georgieva
With the current state of escalating climate emergency, generation of plants with improved ability to sequester carbon is of high priority. The Rieske subunit of the cytochrome b6f complex is a known rate-limiting step in photosynthesis. This protein, encoded for by the PetC gene, is found to increase photosynthetic efficiency upon overexpression in plants, demonstrating potential for increased carbon sequestration. However, due to current restrictions on GMOs, overexpression needs to be achieved nontransgenically to create a practical impact. Given that this has yet to be attempted, this project aims to […]
Heidi Huang
CRISPR-Cas holds great promise for treating Huntington’s Disease, a fatal neurodegenerative disorder. Despite Cas9 RNP’s minimal off-target effects and transient activity, existing RNP delivery methods fall short, limiting RNP therapeutics’ in vivo applications. To address this, the Wilson lab has developed a reversible linker for enhanced RNP brain distribution and editing efficiency. Building on this foundation, my project aims to reduce cytotoxic peptide aggregate formation, which impedes editing efficiency, in Cas9 RNP buffers. Specifically, my research seeks to optimize CRISPR RNP buffer formulations with selected additives to minimize aggregate formation, […]
Tansy Chen
Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) are aquatic bacteria capable of creating a unique intracellular organelle, the magnetosome, that is the location of magnetic crystal biomineralization. They are important models for the molecular study of compartmentalization and biomineralization as well as possible vehicles for biomedical applications. In the model organism Magnetospirillum magneticum strain AMB-1, the magnetosome island (MAI) encodes genes responsible for the creation, alignment, and maturation of a linear magnetosome chain, which ultimately allows the cell to orient and travel along Earth’s magnetic field lines in order to simplify their search for […]
Ekansh Agrawal
X-linked Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (X-SCID) is a genetic disease that predominantly affects XY individuals. It is caused by mutations affecting the IL2RG gene on the X-chromosome and occurs in roughly 1/50,000 to 1/100,000 births. The genetic disease itself affects the expression of the common gamma chain found in a variety of immune cell receptors such as Interleukin-2 Receptor (IL-2) and interleukin-7 Receptor (IL-7). This can result in low numbers of T-cells, Natural Killer Cells, and low B-cells causing patients to be increasingly susceptible to diseases. Without treatment, undiagnosed children typically […]
Agamjot Bal
My project focuses on the production of recombinant NS1 of DENV1-4 and ZIKV strains from Nicaragua. These proteins will be used to investigate whether the antibody profile against NS1 is associated with DENV2 infection outcome in samples from the Nicaraguan Pediatric Dengue Cohort Study. Creating NS1 in this way will allow for proper protein folding, capture of the protein during purification, and assistance with coupling to microspheres for the Luminex analysis. This will provide further insights into NS1’s role in dengue infections and possibly open new avenues for in-house protein […]
Nishita Belur
In patients with Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), repeated activation of dopaminergic neurons facilitates associative learning, as patients associate reward-predictive contexts with reward delivery, in this case, drug administration. AUD is difficult to treat because of the possibility of relapse, which can be modeled as reacquisition of a previously extinguished behavior in a reward learning context. Our focus is the “savings effect”, in which some “original memory” is “saved”, making reacquisition much faster than initial acquisition. The dominant model of reward learning, the Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning model, relies on prospective […]
Brynn Brady
The molecular basis of evolutionary change in morphology is not well understood. Although progress has been made linking genes to morphological phenotypes through genetic knockouts, little is known about how genetic variation underlies observed morphological differences between organisms in nature. Recent studies propose that changes in non-coding genomic regions that regulate transcription called enhancers explain most evolved morphological variation. My research will test the hypothesis that changes in an intronic enhancer of a known developmental gene, Bmp6, underlie evolved changes in tooth patterning in fish. I will perform genomic knock-in […]