| Project Leader: | Danielle Michaud dmichaud@tamu.edu Veterinary Integrative Biosciences |
| Faculty Mentor: |
Dr. Peter P. Nghiem, Ph.D.
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Meeting Times:
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Mondays at 9:00-10:30am, though can potentially be changed if needed.
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Team Size:
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5 (Team Full) |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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If the work leads to a publication and students help write-up the analysis, they will be listed as co-authors. |
| Team Needs: | There are three positions available on this project, and I would like at least 5 hours a week per person. Experience is not required but it would be extremely beneficial to have at least one student researcher with experience using a cryostat for sectioning tissue. The work will comprise of tissue sectioning (rat brain), immunostaining, microscopy, and analysis of images using opensource software ImageJ. The bulk of the project will be microscopy and ImageJ analysis. No animal work is required although the opportunity may arise to aid with rat dissections if the student is interested (not required). Must be hard working, pro-active, willing to learn, and help teach others. Lab times are flexible, and once taught how to analyze images, analysis can be done at home, in the library, etc if the student prefers that to coming in to the lab to analyze. |
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Description:
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Myosin-Va (MYOVA) is an unconventional motor protein that is essential for proper neuronal function, as it transports important cargo within neuronal dendrites. Loss of MYOVA in neurons has a detrimental effect on both their morphology and function, can lead to cell death, and is causative of severe mental retardation and psychomotor function in the human disease Griscelli Syndrome type 1. The loss of MYOVA in glial cells such as oligodendrocytes has been studied to a lesser extent but has also been found to play an important role in their function and morphology. However, currently there is no work detailing how the loss of MYOVA affects astrocytes. The goal of this project is to investigate how the loss of MYOVA function affects the morphology and function of astrocytes through immunofluorescence to determine the changes in astrocyte structure and how the loss of MYOVA affects functionality such as the permeability of the blood brain barrier. I hypothesize that while the astrocyte’s branches and branchlets will maintain their morphology, there will be a significant decrease in the number of leaflets and endfeet, a smaller territory size, and an increase in the blood brain permeability due to deficient MYOVA trafficking. My goal for this project is to confirm the role that MYOVA plays in maintaining the distal cytoskeletal structure in astrocytes with the proposed aims below: Aim 1. Verify the presence of MYOVA in astrocytes. Aim 2. Examine changes in astrocyte morphology due to the loss of MYOVA function. Aim 3. Quantify changes in blood brain barrier permeability due to the loss of MYOVA function.
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