Elizabeth’s BioBlog

After a very long and productive summer, I’m back at UPRM and ready to work on my BioMinds project. During the summer, I was working at Dr. Hawrot’s neuropharmacology laboratory at Brown University in Providence, RI. I studied a mutant chimeric neuronal subunit that conferred α-Bungarotoxin (Bgtx) sensitivity to neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors(nAChRs). nAChRs are receptors found in the cell membrane that bind neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine and nicotine. The receptor is made up of five subunits. The neuronal nAChRs are not sensitive to α-Bgtx, which is a neurotoxin found in some snakes, so a mutant subunit was made to confer sensitivity My goal was to assess if the mutant subunit expressed functionally with a β2 subunit. After experimentation with two-electrode voltage clamp electrophysiology, results suggested that there is no functional expression of the β2 subunit with the chimeric α subunit.

It has been a hectic start at Carrero Lab filled with lessons on starting and preparing your own lab. We start this semester with new funds, seven new students, new materials, brand new AWESOME spinning disk confocal microscope (you can see what our new baby looks like on the picture at the bottom left), and more importantly, bigger and better lab space. We have been overcoming the many challenges of building up a lab from (almost) scratch including installing electricity panels, mounting the new microscope, microinjector and (coming soon) the micromanipulators, moving freezers, incubators, and everything in between. This semester one of our main goals is to set up the lab as best as possible in the new space provided for us. However, knowing my advisor’s incredibly dynamic and assertive character, it’ll all be done in about a month.

In my BioMinds project, Pathway to Synaptogenesis: Motor Protein Function at the Onset of Synaptogenesis, we aim to study the function of a specific motor protein that has an important function in the transport of scaffold proteins to the myopodia, site of the neuromuscular synaptogenesis. We suspect that myosins play a key role in this process. For this reason, some of my goals include the study of several myosin mutant flies and assess the processes occurring at the myopodia at the moment of synaptogenesis.

The skill that I am most looking forward to this semester is to learn how to handle a spinning disk confocal microscope. I also hope to master the difficult technique to dissect the fruit fly embryo in order to do an in vivo study of the motor protein. I will soon be adding a section describing our AMAZING ULTRA MICROSCOPE, so check back to learn more about how it is able to identify three different fluorophores, and how it works with polarized light, halogen light, and mercury light.