Ryan McCann is a junior who majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. He was awarded a Spring 2019 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on experimental mouse tissue under Dr. David Weinshenker.
When reading through literature on PubMed, you rarely see a research paper that has no acknowledgments. Most projects need multiple people putting their time and energy into producing the best results possible. Thus, there are often many names included in the acknowledgements, because the main authors needed assistance. I recently ran into some difficulties with my own project and realized just how important it is to work with other members of the research community.
For the past two years, I have been fortunate to be a research assistant in the Weinshenker Laboratory(http://genetics.emory.edu/research/weinshenker/). Working with Dr. Weinshenker has been an amazing experience. I have been assigned to multiple projects, and exposed to different types of experiments. I began by working on an addiction study, but for the past year and a half, my projects have involved Alzheimer’s disease. A major advantage of working on multiple projects is that I have been exposed to how important collaborative work is in science.
This year, I’ve been working on a project in experimental mouse tissue. The tissue is thought to contain pathology similar to what is seen in Alzheimer’s disease, in the locus coeruleus (LC). The LC is a brainstem nucleus which supplies the majority of the brain’s norepinephrine, and it has been proposed that Alzheimer’s pathology originates in the LC. To locate the LC, I have been staining the tissue with an antibody against tyrosine hydroxylase (TH), an enzyme involved in the production of norepinephrine. A characteristic of brains with Alzheimer’s disease pathology is neuroinflammation, which I have been able to stain for using antibodies specific to activated glial cells. I currently have plans to stain for Alzheimer’s-like pathology in the LC region, but have not yet begun this part of the process.
In the beginning of spring semester, I was having difficulties with my experiments. I spent a majority of my time adjusting the blocking serum step, which is used to stop any non-target proteins from binding to the antibodies. I was seeing little staining, and thought this was because background, non-target staining was too high, drowning out my specific markers. It was frustrating and confusing. However, after more than a month of testing different mixtures of blocking serum, I was going nowhere. I asked a PhD student in my lab to look over my experiments. He quickly noticed a flaw with a different step of my experiment. This led to my tissue becoming too hot, making it not viable for staining. The day we fixed that part of the experiment, everything started working correctly. That mistake was very annoying, as I had been missing something that’s seemingly so simple, and it was destroying any chance of results. From this, I realized I’m still learning, and need to seek advice.
Since then, the rest of the semester has gone well. I have successfully stained for TH, locating the LC in my experimental tissue, and I have also partially finished staining for neuroinflammation. If I could give one piece of advice to someone going into undergraduate research, it would be: don’t be afraid to ask for help. I’m a fairly stubborn person and tend to try solving any problem I have entirely by myself. I had been certain that the overall design of my experiment was fine, and the issue was that I had not found the proper formula for my blocking serum. Sometimes, you get so wrapped up in your own thoughts, that you miss the little things, and a fresh set of eyes can find where you’re wrong and help your project progress, as happened with me.
I still have a decent amount of work to do to finish my project, but I think I am in a much better place to succeed now. I’m starting to realize my own personal limitations and I am seeking help when I need it. The recent success of my experiments has made my project far more satisfying, and I would never have been able to reach this point if I hadn’t asked for help.
Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Independent Research Grants.
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