Jae Ho Paek
Reactive oxygen speciesincluding hydrogen peroxide, superoxide, and hydroxyl radicalare commonly blamed for causing a variety of oxidative damages in cell. However, there are scientific papers published that suggest these reactive oxygen species actually play fruitful, not harmful, roles in cells. The increasing need for studying these reactive oxygen species calls for the development of tools that can be used for effectively detecting these reactive oxygen species in vivo. Hydroethidinethe reduced state of ethidium bromide, a common DNA dyeis recognized as a reliable superoxide probe. However, hydroethidine can be much improved […]
Tresa McGranahan
Jimmy Yin
With a prevalence of about 18% of the American adult population, anxiety disorders are an increasingly important focus of mental health research. Such disorders can severely diminish the quality of an individuals daily life. In both the animal and human literature, fear conditioning has provided an important model of the abnormal development of learned fear responses associated with anxiety disorders. One important question has been whether anxiety is characterized by greater generalization of fear responses. This is typically examined by testing stimuli that vary along some dimension in similarity from […]
Gabriel Wong
Mallika Lal
Antibiotic resistance in the Enterobacteriaceae family, which includes Gram-negative bacteria E. coli and Klebsiella, has become a serious public health problem. Many bacteria of this family produce extended-spectrum beta-lactamases (ESBLs), which are enzymes that can degrade most beta-lactam antibiotics. Therefore, carbapenems, a type of beta-lactam drug, are increasingly the drugs of last resort for ESBL-producing bacteria. However, an enzyme called Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC) threatens to render carbapenems completely ineffective, leaving few choices for treatment in patients with infections caused by KPC-producing species. In fact, the CDC has designated carbapenem-resistant […]
Siti Galang Keo
Ron Cook
Nearly all life on Earth depends on oxygenic photosynthesis, the process by which light energy is used to create sugars and oxygen from water and carbon dioxide. In plants and algae, it is carried out in organelles called chloroplasts, which are cousins of photosynthetic bacteria known as cyanobacteria. Both chloroplasts and cyanobacteria contain membrane-enclosed sacs called thylakoids, and the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis take place in the thylakoid membrane. Here, light hits the protein complex Photosystem II (PSII), and this energy is used to split water into oxygen, protons, and […]
Jamie Lynn Inman
Annika Anderson
Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) is a set of genetically inherited neurodegenerative disorders that leads to degeneration of photoreceptor neurons and loss of vision. While onset of RP can be detected early, there are currently no treatments to prevent disease progression. Cellular reprogramming is a promising approach to replenishing photoreceptors after retinal degeneration. In zebrafish, Mller glial cells can dedifferentiate and reprogram into photoreceptor cells upon retinal damage. However, this restorative activity of Mller glial cells is limited in mammals. A CAS9 mediated genome wide activation screen offers the potential to identify […]
Cory Berger
Discovering how traits evolve or are lost is key to understanding the processes underlying biodiversity. Web-building is an ancestral trait in orb-weaving spiders, but several taxa have secondarily lost the ability to build webs. Among the long-jawed spiders of the genus Tetragnatha, there are species that exhibit a range of web-building phenotypes, including the total loss of web-building and the construction of reduced webs. My research will use Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) to investigate the silk organs of these species, which will provide a clear picture of the morphologies associated […]