Muscarinic Receptor Modulation in Neuronal Networks
During one of my
earlier semesters in school, I attended a seminar where I learned about
prosthetics or virtual fingers being controlled by a human’s brain. The fact
that we have the technology to perform this just astounded me. When I started
my Bioengineering degree, I realized that I like to deal with things on a
cellular level and that I am very intrigued by the complexity of the brain. The
biology aspect is probably what intrigued me the most and drew me to
Bioengineering. In my project, I record the electrical activity of neurons
(brain cells). Once I started learning about the project, my interest grew and
I started asking questions about how everything worked and started digging
deeper. The brain is such an interesting and crucial part of the body. We need
it to perform the simplest tasks, and when something small goes wrong it can
affect us in a much more substantial way. In the future, I hope to continue research
related to the research I am involved in currently. Long-term, I hope to be helping
develop or improve brain-powered prosthetics or be involved in a project
concerning brain activity and behavior.
In a typical week,
I will conduct extracellular recordings of neuronal networks for the first half
of the week and analyze the data either later in the week or the following
week. For each network, I first take a baseline recording of the cells for 30
minutes. Then I add the desired concentration of Amyloid Beta to the network
and record for another 30 minutes. Amyloid Beta is the focus of my project
because it is known to be causal to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). I am attempting
to appropriately simulate AD and create a testing platform for AD targeting
drugs. After the first Amyloid Beta recording, I will then take recordings 4,
8, and 24 hours after this initial recording. To process the data, I use
certain software which allows me to group similar waveforms together to
indicate the activity of separate neurons. After all the processing, I used
MATLAB to generate plots of the activity and Microsoft Excel to generate bar
graphs of average activity for each type of recording. This week I created bar
graphs for the first time and I discovered that a small dose of Amyloid Beta
doesn’t seem to affect the neurons significantly.
