When I joined the Cox lab, I had the
benefit of being able to select from a wide variety of potential projects to
participate in. I chose to study miRNAs and their influence on how neurons
develop in the Drosophila peripheral nervous system because RNA
interference is such an important and “hot” area in molecular biology. miRNAs
are very small RNA molecules that are able to regulate the expression of many
different genes. Determining which miRNAs influence neuron development will
give us very interesting insight into what genes influence how and why neurons
create the structures that they do.
I am very interested in pursuing
research in the future. I am still in the process of deciding whether or not to
pursue a career in medicine or applied biological research. Regardless of where
I go with my education, the techniques I have learned while pursuing
undergraduate research have helped me immensely. I have had the benefit of
learning many interesting techniques that will be great to apply to future
projects.
On any given week, I am making genetic
crosses between flies of different mutations to design flies that have the
genetic material that I desire. I also spend time taking images of neurons via
a confocal microscope, which is able to take many pictures of a single object
along the Z axis and compress them. This allows us to create a comprehensive
two dimensional image of a three dimensional object. I also spend time
isolating neurons of interest from the fly larvae.
One thing that I discovered this week
is that when we remove certain miRNAs from the fly, it has a statistically
significant effect on the expression of certain genes. This is very exciting,
as it confirms that the genes that I predicted would be targets of these miRNAs
are, in fact, targets.
