Photo that I took under a fluorescence microscope of Cells stained to depict Actin, Tubulin and DNA.
Paper
Research in Biological Sciences @ UChicago
In the summer of 2023, I was accepted to attend the Research in Biological Sciences Program at UChicago. In this program, I learnt and applied procedures such as PCR, RNA interference and fluorescence microscopy and acquired the organizational skills required at a lab. We investigated the relationship between the dopaminergic and glutamatergic pathways in C. elegans and their effect on locomotion through double RNAi.
However, the gene sequencing results, which we received after completing our behavioral assays, revealed that the three genes we used weren’t the receptor genes we intended to study. While this setback hindered our work, I was able to adapt and identify a link between a gene that we studied and our research question through creative exploration of literature that we would not have considered otherwise. This project further demonstrated the complex regulatory network between the body and the brain, as the gene we studied had no direct impact on the dopaminergic pathway and yet regulated the physiological state of the neurons involved.
Poster Presentation
Here is the poster presented by my team and I together with our TA.
