| Affiliations: | DARPA |
| Project Leader: | Osama Qureshi osamaq@tamu.edu Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology |
| Faculty Mentor: | Dr. Lindsay Dawson, Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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Tuesday Nights at 7PM |
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Team Size:
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4 (Team Full) |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Able to experience an internationally recognized lab conducting high impact, cutting edge research (without freezing to death in New England). Gain valuable and transferable skills in a biomedical setting Great opportunity to potentially co-author a publication that you can bring out to bolster your academic and professional “street cred”
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Team Needs:
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Highly motivated, independent, and critically thinking students with a thirst to quaff deeply from the fountains of knowledge in a quirky lab environment filled with eccentric personalities. Congeniality is essential in our unorthodox but effective work space.
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Description:
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Almost 1 out of 200 Americans is an amputee. Meaning that more than 1.7 million people are living with limb loss in the United States, and this number is projected to double by 2050, reaching an upwards of 3.6 million. Thus regeneration of body parts, especially limbs, has long captured the imaginations both scientists, healthcare providers, and the public. For example, popular culture is abound with characters who can regenerate body parts heal after injuries that would normally be fatal. Yet, the dream of regeneration of body parts, like the dreams of George Milton and Lennie Smalls in Steinbeck’s classic novella, have remained thus far elusive. This all being said, new research on the diminutive third phalangeal (P3) digit is beginning to unearth possible new ways to essentially re-grow that which could not be had once lost. Regeneration itself is actually not a process rooted in fantasy. Our bodies regenerate cells every day, constantly replacing tissues like skin or the lining of our stomachs. However, this homeostatic regeneration differs in contrast to epimorphic regeneration of complex organs or limbs that is common in vertebrates such as salamanders and axolotls. A defining characteristic that distinguished the latter from the former is the presence of a blastema, a heterogeneous, lineage dependent, and transient mass of cells that mediates the regenerative response. Mammals, unlike salamanders, have generally lost epimorphic regeneration in the evolutionary process, except for a few instances. One of the most studied of these blastema-mediated regenerating models is the terminal phalanx (P3) digit. Our studies focus on the blastema in trying to answer a particular question: Where exactly does it come from? Recent data has demonstrated that the blastema is derived from cells located on the outer surface “periosteal” and inner surface “endosteal” regions of the amputated P3 bone. In this particular study, we will be conducting lineage mapping using transgenic mice to trace back blastemal cell populations. Basically, we are using a model to show the ancestry of cells within a regenerating context.
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