Jonanne Talebloo
In today’s digital age, there is increasing worry about how children and adolescents are affected by their screen habits. Excessive screen time among them has been tied to various health issues like mental health concerns, physical ailments, obesity, sedentary lifestyles, and sleep disturbances. As parents play key roles during childhood and adolescence, parenting approaches, and home atmospheres have been recognized as influencers that may contribute to children’s screen use patterns. In general, more attentive parental supervision has been linked to reduced total screen usage among children and adolescents. Our purpose […]
Bradley Vu
Methane is a significant target in efforts to combat climate change due to its high potency as a greenhouse gas. In the agricultural sector, cattle farming is among the highest contributors to methane emissions. Promisingly, the compound bromoform can inhibit methane production within cattle and reduce intestinal methane levels. Cattle ranchers have applied this process by feeding cows a red seaweed that natively synthesizes bromoform. However, concentrated, industrial seaweed farming can be costly and the practices used can themselves contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, a novel method of bromoform […]
Nathan Lin
The increasing threat of devastating wildfires in California has sparked interest in improving forest management, initiating work with indigenous tribes to integrate traditional knowledge with modern practices such as prescribed burning and mechanical fuel reduction. The efficacy of these techniques has previously been studied, but less is known about their effects on invertebrate communities. To address this, the Will lab has an ongoing, 4-year sampling project in the San Vicente Redwoods, studying how ground-dwelling arthropods are affected by different levels of mechanical treatment. I will characterize the beetle community in […]
Joshua Wong
The focus of my project is to study the connection between mating status (mated versus virgin) and bitter taste processing. It has been shown that there are taste processing modulations post-mating for females to uptake more protein, salt, and sugar for egg production. My project’s specific question is if bitter taste is also modulated when given a bitter/sweet mixture. I also want to look into the effects and functions of this behavioral change: one hypothesis we have is that flies use this taste mechanism for detecting the environment when wanting […]
Hank Wang
Understanding the neurobiology of cue-driven behaviors is important given that they play a critical role in substance abuse and binge eating disorders, particularly with cues such as drug paraphernalia and palatable food. Previous research suggests that these environmental cues and outcomes of these actions are represented in cortical brain structures. Additionally, ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons are involved in assigning values to these cues, which also works in coordination with the prefrontal cortex, ventral hippocampus, and amygdala. The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is connected to all the aforementioned regions, utilizing its […]
Abby Wang
Microbiome editing is an emerging technology that has the potential to help us understand bacterial dynamics and interactions within diverse communities that were not previously accessible. This has many diverse scientific and technological applications that include therapeutic and environmental interventions. However, editing the genome of targeted species within these communities is still nascent and limited. The Rubin Lab has developed DNA-editing all-in-one RNA-guided CRISPR–Cas transposase (DART) plasmid editing systems encoding CRISPR-associated transposons (CASTs) that are optimized for microbiome editing. DART currently does not work in all organisms and has limited […]
Bradley Vu
As we age, we are more at risk for permanent injuries to the central nervous system due to losing the ability to repair that damage. Most warm-blooded animals experience this issue, losing their remarkable early neural regenerative capabilities with age. This loss is characterized by a distinct decrease in neural stem cells, especially radial glia that play a role in stem cell migration towards injuries. As such, we must explore ways to maintain radial glial cell populations in older mammals. Prior research has demonstrated that novel adrenergic-thyroid hormone interactions involving […]
Daniel Voronel
Pseudomonas syringae Race 1 strain (R1T1) is one of the most prevalent plant pathogens and is known to cause severe loss in worldwide crop yield. In order to cause infection, P. syringae utilizes the type III secretion system to inject particles known as “effectors” into the host cell cytoplasm. The effectors work to suppress the immunity of the host cell and cause disease. For modern cultivars of tomatoes, resistance to P. syringae has been hard to come by. Many modern cultivars have been subject to genetic alteration and it’s possible […]
Michael Verdolin
The four dengue virus serotypes (DENV1–4) are the most prevalent arboviruses in humans and a major public health concern worldwide, responsible for over 100 million infections yearly, of whom 51 million will develop symptoms ranging from self-limiting dengue fever to fatal dengue shock syndrome. Infection generates antibodies (Abs) that can cross-react with another serotype, increasing the risk of subsequent symptomatic or severe DENV infection. Previous studies aiming at determining the Ab repertoire against DENV implicate the envelope protein’s fusion loop (FL) as an immunodominant epitope Anti-FL Abs are broadly cross-reactive […]
Jessica Vance
The ribosome decodes mRNA into a sequence of amino acids which form all of life’s proteins. However these protein’s structures are limited by the properties of the set 20 amino acids. My project, as a part of the Center for Genetically Encoded Materials, aims to engineer the highly conserved ribosome to incorporate amino acids with different chemical scaffolding than the canonical set. My project is based on data from the modeling of a Cryogenic Electron Microscopy ribosome which suggests deleting a nucleotide (U2585) in the catalytic center of the ribosome, […]