The origin of my project stems from
multiple areas of interest in my life. The first being my desire to broaden my
understanding of the biochemical aspects of the structure and function of the
human body especially those that take place in the brain and cause disease. My
second major interest was in learning what it takes to pursue a career in
research. As I began to meet many people who either had or knew someone who suffered
from diseases such as diabetics, schizophrenia, and seizures it made me want to
learn more about these diseases, and what exactly caused them. Therefore, after
doing lots of research on these topics, I took the knowledge that I gained from
each of them and applied them in an experiment that I believed could yield
useful results and help me gain a better understanding of the brain while doing
so.
For my project, I looked at the effects
that a defective GLUT3 receptor would have on the cells overall ability to
maintain its resting membrane potential. If this defect caused negative
implications in the receptors’ ability to translocate back into the cytoplasmic
membrane (as a result of increased energy demand by the neuronal cell), I
wanted to discover if this can potentially result in epileptic seizures. This
is significant because the lifespan of most human nerve cells is typically like
life span of the individual. Therefore, if there is a defect or mutation that
effects that cells normal function, there is a greater possibility that it can
have negative lifelong implications. This ties in with my life long goal of
discovering new ways to help people detect and treat various diseases as I
pursue father health care degrees.
Every week I did literature searches for
sure! Aside from that I carried out various measurements and calculations as
well as maintain my cell cultures.
The one thing that I have definitely learned
is that research is difficult, and it does require a lot of work, but if your
passionate about what you are doing, you can be successful and discover even
more things than what you originally intended.
