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Katie Connolly
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Student
Scientists: Katie Connolly
By Charles Reineke
Katie Connolly,
a 21-year-old senior biology
major from Kansas City, Mo., spent her summer trying to figure
out exactly how misplaced facial branchiomotor neurons (FBNs)
in the embryonic hindbrains of zebra fish mutants — elbow-macaroni-shaped
variants of the popular home aquarium denizen — manage
to correctly route themselves through the circuit-like system
of neurons in the fishs’ brains. Do the neurons migrate
to the right place later in development? Might the circuit simply
reorganize itself?
Connolly is looking for answers with Anand
Chandrasekhar, an assistant professor of biological sciences,
and Stephanie Bingham, a biology graduate student working on
a doctoral degree. They use zebra fish because their embryos
are transparent, Connolly explains, making observation more
convenient. Convenient, she adds, but far from simple.
Connolly
first sought to examine a neural circuit controlling jaw movement,
the idea being to compare differences in the position of neurons
in mutant survivors to those in normal fish of the same age.
Connolly began by collecting cross sections of survivors’ tiny
brains, then mounted them on slides and used a powerful microscope
to note the location of neurons.
“But that was a long-term project,
and the equipment that we needed wasn’t available over
the summer,” she
says.
“So we switched gears and started a second project, one
that involved working with a dye to label neurons that connected
to these migrating, jaw-muscle-controlling neurons.”
Most
of her fish had been bred with special proteins attached to their
motor neurons, “so I could see them under fluorescence,”
Connolly says. “We knew where the [FBN] neurons were, but
we didn’t know what was connecting to them, how their
info was getting to the brain and to the muscles.” Discovering
these connections will take more time, and thus the labeling
project is ongoing, she says.
A third project, the one she presented
at the summer research symposium, involved injecting a fluorescing
dye near the FBNs of 48-hour-old zebra fish embryos. This allowed
her to investigate how the shape, or morphology, of motor neurons
might affect neural network communication. The project was a
success, despite its daunting logistics.
“I mean, ‘micro-injection’ doesn’t
begin to describe what we’re doing,” says Connolly
as she gestures toward a fish tank full of miniscule mutants. “It’s
like trying to give someone an injection with a garden hose.”
Connolly is again working in Chandrasekhar’s
lab this fall, and will begin medical
school at MU next year. “I had wanted to do research
for a long time, and it was actually really lucky that [Chandrasekhar]
happened to ask me,” Connolly says. “Having the
chance to do research in cell biology was just really exciting
to me. And it’s been a lot of fun, frustrating at times,
but fun.”
Connolly’s lab mate during the summer,
Gesulla Toussaint, a junior biology major at Barry University
in Miami Shores, Fla., echoes the sentiment. Her project, funded
by the National Science Foundation’s Research
Experience for Undergraduates, involved developing new methodologies
for improving the quality of embryonic zebra fish specimens and
the images researchers use to study them. “We are making
progress, yes,” says the 20-year-old native of Haiti, “and
Columbia has been great.”
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Last Update:
March 12, 2007
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