Print2010-2011 RASA Awards
Tue, Jan 19, 2010
The Graduate School has granted Drs. Eric Haag, William (Bill) Jeffery, and Hey-Kyoung Lee a semester Research and Support Award (RASA) to be taken in academic year 2010 -2011. The RASA allows faculty to devote themselves full time to their projects during either fall semester 2009 or spring semester 2010.
Please take a minute to read Drs. Haag, Jeffery, and Lee's (respectively) abstracts for their RASA projects.
Professor Bill Jeffery is the
world’s expert on the developmental and evolutionary genetics of the Mexican
Cave Tetra, Astyanax mexicanus. His work has shown that loss of
eyes is the result of natural selection.
Pigmentation protects animals from the damaging effects of sunlight, and has auxiliary rolesin camouflage, sexual display, and mimicry. In habitats lacking sunlight and where vision is not useful, such as the perpetual darkness of caves, manmade catacombs, deep soil and oceans, and in parasites living deep within the bodies of other animals, melanin pigment has often been lost (see Figure), resulting in albinism. Albinism is also a prevalentcondition in humans, and its complications require a major investment inmedical care. How and why does albinism evolve repeatedly in different animals? Why does it appear in 1 of 17,000 humans? Little is known about the molecular mechanisms underlying the broad evolutionary convergence in albinism. As a result of this RASA award, Jeffery will be able to focus on this unsolved problem in biology. He will use subterranean albino animals as models to investigate the molecular basis of albinism. The major reason for this choice is the large diversity of albino animals in subterranean habitats (Figure). Another reason is that his laboratory has expertise in studying albino cave animals, including the cavefish Astyanax mexicanus, which is becoming a biomedical model for eye and pigmentation diseases. The research goals are: (1) to determine andcompare the points of lesion in the melanin biosynthetic pathways of diverse subterranean animals from limestone caves, lava tubes, and manmade catacombs, (2) to identify and compare the genes responsible for albinism in theseanimals, and (3) to investigate the nature of mutations in these genes. Outcomes of this investigation would be the identification of albinism genes and an understanding of whether the same or different genes and molecular mechanisms cause albinism in different species.
Hey-Kyoung Lee is an expert in neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to reorganize neural pathways. An organism’s survival and adaptation to the environment critically depends on proper and effective processing of sensory inputs. In higher vertebrates, primary sensory cortices in the brain process specific sensory experience to allow conscious representation of the sensory environment. It has been thought that different sensory modalities (vision, audition, tactile etc.) are processed via separate areas in the brain called primary sensory cortices. However, emerging data suggest there are many levels of integration across the sensory systems that allow exchange of information to provide a coherent perception of the world. In addition to multisensory integration, interaction across different sensory systems provides a substrate for sensory compensation in the event of losing a sensory modality. The term “cross-modal plasticity” is used to describe changes in the brain that allow sensory compensation, but the neural basis of this is unknown. In this proposal, I plan to investigate whether the synaptic changes in primary sensory cortices of visually deprived rodents represent alterations in the functional connectivity of neurons. This work will be done during my sabbatical (planned for the Fall of 2010) in Dr. Scott Thompson’s laboratory at the University of Maryland School of Medicine(UMAB). Knowledge gained from our proposed study can be generalized to provide a better understanding of how sensory experience globally affects different brain regions.
