Faculty & Staff
Daniel G. Gibson, III
Assistant Professor
Faculty Listing
Office: Goddard Hall, 005
Phone: +1-508-831-5144
Fax: +1-508-831-5936
dgibson@wpi.edu
Educational Background
- B.A., Stanford, 1966
- M.A., William & Mary, 1969
- Ph.D., Boston University, 1980
Research & Teaching Interests
Amino acid neurotransmitters; amebocyte culture; invertebrate learning
Research
Amino Acid Neurotransmitters
Glutamic acid has gained notoriety as the transmitter that is released during strokes in the brain, with disastrous results. Yet this same amino acid benignly excites the muscles of lobsters, grasshoppers, and other arthropods. The suggestion that it is Aspartic, rather than Glutamic, acid that makes horseshoe crab muscles twitch is being challenged in our lab. Lucie Lasovsky is continuing work she started for her MQP to verify that glutamate is present in the nerve terminals of horseshoe crabs. She and Susan Scott showed glutamate immunoreactivity while anti-aspartate does not bind to nerve terminals. But their work was on the light microscope level. Lucie will be using immunogold on epoxy-embedded thin sections to localize the transmitter to synaptic vesicles via electron microscopy.
Amebocyte Culture
Kerry Flynn continues research on growing horseshoe crab blood cells, both inside the crab and out of. it. Capitalizing on Jill Friberg's finding that molting hormone, ecdysone, increases in vivo cell counts, Kerry will be culturing with ecdysone and with two pesticide formulations from Rohm and Haas which mimic ecdysone's growth promoting effects in lepidopteran insect caterpillars but ultimately kill them. Kerry is both testing the toxicity of this pesticide on horseshoe crabs, and exploring its use as a growth factor
Invertebrate Learning
Horseshoe crabs learn; everyone who has ever fed them will attest to that, but experiments to back up the anecdotes have so far been inconclusive. We have had good luck in training to secondary signals, i.e., after feeding concomitant with a light flash, the crab will go to the feeding station upon light flash, with or without food. In addition to training experiments,. we are looking for the memory/neurotrophic factor ependymin in horseshoe crabs, with immunochemical methods like the ones Lucie is using. George Barroso is the antibody man, working on this MS; Stacy Pratt is doing some of the training/ behavior assessment.
Collaborations
- Dr. Zyerla at Clark: Electron microscopy of mouse light ear mutant fibroblasts.
- Cy Tamanaha (BE): Artificial membranes.