Nikolay Nichiporuk
After the tragic death of Kitty Genovese, a woman who was stabbed to death in front of several neighbors, a scientific investigation was made into the bystander effect. Bibb Latane of Columbia and John Darley of Princeton were the first to study the phenomena. Latane & Darley (1968) designed the classic bystander research paradigm where a comparison between helping rates of individuals who witness a crime versus a group of people who witness the same crime. Across their studies, they have found that 75% of people helped when faced with […]
Xuchen Hu
Desiccation tolerance is an organisms ability to withstand removal of as much as 95% of its intracellular water and be able to resume normal metabolism upon rehydration. However the molecular basis for tolerance is not completely understood. Budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is one of the rare species that exhibit this amazing trait and is an excellent organism to study desiccation tolerance. Upon desiccation, yeast, like other desiccation tolerant organisms, accumulates the disaccharide trehalose. However, mutants that are unable to make trehalose exhibit significant tolerance, suggesting the existence of other molecules […]
Kyle Barbour
Sevoflurane, a popular pediatric and veterinary general anesthetic, is known to cause deficits in learning and memory when administered to neonatal rodents. Since sevoflurane can trigger epileptiform activity when administered during development, and since neonatal epileptic seizures cause the formation of aberrant neural networks, it is possible that sevoflurane administered during development does the same. If present, this may contribute to the observed neurocognitive deficits. We will explore this possibility by retrovirally labeling the hippocampal mossy fiber pathway and medial prefrontal cortex in neonatal rats, then comparing the connections of […]
Adam Krause
Recent evidence suggests that sleep and sleep loss have profound effects on emotional brain reactivity, especially for positive emotional experiences. As a consequence, sleep disruption may lead to detrimental risk taking and reward seeking. However, it remains unclear exactly what type of sleep helps reset the brains ability to appropriately react to rewarding experiences. I propose to test the hypothesis that a specific type of sleeprapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, and its associated electrical brain activityrestores the optimal next-day reactivity to rewarding, motivating experiences. I will therefore investigate whether the quantity […]
Jared Rosen
The H, K ATPase is a P-type ATPase proton pump that is highly expressed in the gastric parietal cell. This enzymatic proton pump is responsible for creating the highly acidic environment in the lumen of the stomach. The protein is comprised of a larger catalytic “alpha” subunit that creates the high proton gradient and a smaller “beta” subunit. The goal of my research project is to gain a deeper insight into how it is that the H,K ATPase protects itself from digestion by the very acid that it produces to […]
Alina Boltunova
Emmetropization is a normal developmental process in which the eyes growth is regulated to achieve a match between eye length and its refractive power. It results in the reduction of refractive errors present at birth and has been observed in all animal species, including humans, studied thus far. The guinea pig is increasingly used to model myopia (near-sightedness), but there appear to be differences between guinea pig strains in their susceptibility to myopia-inducing stimuli. To understand the origin of these differences, I plan to compare the emmetropization of different strains […]
Michelle Leu
In my research, I plan to investigate the role of vitamin A in obesity prevention. With obesity increasing at alarming rates in the United States in the past twenty years, it is imperative to gain a deeper understanding in the development of the condition. Obesity is influenced by many risk factors such as diet, lifestyle, and genetics. I will explore how vitamin A regulates adipose tissue, observing mice with the Rdh10 gene conditionally deleted in white adipose tissue, and comparing their weight gain to that of wild type control mice. […]
Timothy Roth
The current energy crisis in the US has demanded the production of alternative, renewable fuels to replace our current petroleum-based fuels. However, the limitations of the current biofuel standard, ethanol, require the development of second-generation fuels that can be used with existing engines and infrastructure. One such fuel is n-butanol, which the M. Chang group has successfully produced at good yield using a synthetic metabolic pathway engineered into E. coli. The Dueber Lab has demonstrated that synthetic protein scaffolds can be used to colocalize enzymes in metabolic pathways in varying […]
John Campo
The ultimate goal of my research is to identify the structure of the subunit of DNA polymerase III in Aquifex aeolicus (Aquifex) using X-ray crystallography. DNA pol III is the enzyme that is responsible for the majority of the DNA replication that occurs in this strain of bacteria. The the subunit of DNA pol III is responsible for the polymerase activity. To date, the structure of the replicative unit has only been determined in two gram-negative bacteria, Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Thermus aquaticus (Taq) (Lamers et al., 2006, and […]
Marisa Lim
Comparison of DNA sequences between different populations often reveals genetic lineages that warrant further study to assess the validity of current species delineations. Recent genetic work on the California ground squirrel uncovered three morphologically cryptic lineages. The Northern and Central lineages come into contact near Lake Almanor. The Central and Southern lineages meet near Mono Lake. Preliminary work found genetic differences distinguishing the Northern and Central lineages, despite the apparent absence of a geographic barrier to gene flow. In contrast, the Central and Southern lineages are genetically mixed (based on […]