The ProjectLab: AY2011-12 MQP Opportunities

What is the ProjectLab?

The Biology & Biotechnology ProjectLab provides MQP opportunities for students to work on projects directly affiliated with faculty research in the department's MQP lab on campus. The lab will be located in Goddard Hall along with the rest of the teaching labs starting in the 2009-2010 academic year. This year 6 projects are available to multiple student teams and approaches span from animal to plants as areas of study. Each project is proposed and sponsored by a Biology & Biotechnology faculty member and designed so that the data from the project will contribute directly to that faculty member's current research. Daily work on the project will be overseen by the Project Lab Director (Mike Buckholt). Weekly meetings of the teams, the lab director, and the faculty sponsor will allow students to present their work to the group and to understand how their findings, along with those of other students working on the project, contribute to the overall research goals. Projects will run throughout the academic year and may start or continue into E term if student interest warrants. Not all students need to be registered for every term. Varying schedules of terms and credits can be accommodated.

Students interested in working in the ProjectLab should apply to Mike Buckholt at mbuckhol@wpi.edu using the ProjectLab form.

The Projects

Genetics of Candida Infection

Infection by the yeast Candida can be a serious health issue for many people.  The infection is difficult to treat with current drug therapies. Understand what makes Candida invasive and infectious would be a great help in discovering and designing treatments for Candidiasis. This project will further the understanding of Candida infection using the flat worm C. elegans as a model system to screen for C. elegans mutants that are resistant to Candida albicans infections.  Candida kills worms in about 48 hours.  The protocol would involve growing worms synchronously to the L4 stage, transferring them en masse to Candida-containing plates, and observing worms to see if any survive.  These can be picked and characterized.  These surviving worms can be used to identify genes that, when mutated, confer resistance to infection.  Lots of genes are known that cause susceptibility to infection when knocked out, but very few mutations increase resistance.  In other words, anything discovered by this project is likely to be interesting.  This project will build on last year's project in two ways.  It will continue the search for new and unknown mutants as well as begin to define and characterize the mutants isolated by last year's project students.

Techniques: genetic screens, phenotype characterization, microscopy, PCR, sequencing. Number of students: 6-8

Project Code: MB2

The Crayfish and Water Projects 

Crayfish are found in fresh water throughout the world. Several different species can be found right here in Massachusetts including two different species in Institute Pond. They can be used to study molecular phylogeny, behavior, and water quality issues. The Crayfish Project examines all of these lines of research both singly and in combination.

Sentinel species for water quality:

Crayfish can also be used as a model organism to examine local water quality.  Nearly all of the chemicals we use, whether residential or industrial, eventually end in the watershed and in particular the sediment in the bottom of lakes and streams.  Animals like crayfish that live in that environment can serve as excellent sentinel species to track accumulation of toxins.  This project focuses on the distribution of polyaromatic hydrocarbons, in particular on benso[a]pyrene (BaP).  Previous projects have demonstrated a correlation between the level of BaP in crayfish tissue and river sediment where the crayfish were collected.  Future work could follow one of two tracks: obtaining statistically significant correlations between sediment and crayfish levels of BaP, or investigations centered on the questions of how fast crayfish accumulate BaP in their enviornment and/or how fast accumulated BaP in metabolized and excreted.  Students choosing to work on this project will collect animals from a local watershed and will analyze crayfish tissue and sediment samples using a number of chemical techniques including sample excretion, and gas chromatography or HPLC.

Techniques: gas chromatography, or HPLC, field collection, tissue extraction.  Number of students:3-4

Project Code: MB2-WQ12

Behavioral and Reproductive Physiology Studies:

Interactions between native and invasive species (species introduced outside their natural ranges by human activities) are thought to be important drivers of biodiversity loss.  Direct experimental investigations of invasive populations as causative agents in those declines are relatively rare. If replacement of native taxa by invasives is driven by an external factor or factors, such as environmental changes, that trigger decreases in native populations, then the prevalence of invasive taxa is a symptom, rather than a cause, of biodiversity changes. In North America, freshwater faunas are particularly vulnerable to ecological changes, because of heavy manipulation of habitats by human activity. In addition, North America harbors a substantial majority of the world's boidiversity in freshwater crayfish, many of which are considered to be species of conservation concern. Furthermore, biodiversity in this group may be poorly understood; in southern New England, we are recently characterized and described a new species, Orconectes quinebaugi, which apparently occurs only in this region and may thus be relatively rare. It has been confused with O. virilis, a widespread species that is invasive in New England. We propose a series of experiments to investigate interactions between these two species. First, we will investigate reproductive interactions; hybridization between invasives and native species can have important implications for the evolutionary trajectories of both taxa. Second, we hypothesize that the two taxa are ecological competitors through two mechanisms. We predict that the presence of the other species will alter life history characteristics (i.e., growth & resproductive rates, size at sexual maturity) of each; Students doing this MQP can choose to examine these possibilities and this prediction in several ways 1) carrying out field investigations in natural streams in both sympatry and in allopatry (for both species) and 2) carrying out common garden experiments (setting up controlled populations and observing them) 3) Study of Crayfish reproductive morphology and size relationships including exploratory dissections to elucidate how crayfish reproductive works. 

This project or parts of it can be started in E term.

Techniques: field collection, behavioral observation, dissection, microscopy, electron microscopy, molecular genotyping. Number of students: 3-4

Project Code: MB2-CB12

Molecular Phylogeny

Crayfish are quite mobile within a watershed but not necessarily between watersheds. This geographic separation can lead to populations that are reproductively isolated from each other, making the study of crayfish population genetics very interesting. Native populations can be subject to competition by invasive species that have either migrated or been artificially introduced into an environment by humans. The molecular component of the project examines and begins to define the population structure and relatedness of both native and invasive species. Students in this project will collect specimens, extract DNA, perform PCR amplification, and send samples for DNA sequencing and analysis. The project may also include microsatellite and AFLP generation and analysis. Data generated will be used to examine the genetics of the crayfish population in question.

Techniques: Field collection, DNA extraction and analysis, PCR, Sequencing, and analysis of molecular data.  Number of students: 4
Project Code: MB2-CM12

   Horseshoe Crab Project 

Limulus polyphemus is remarkable in that its form differs so little from other horseshoe crabs that lived 300 million years ago, as if its evolution practically stopped back then. How can it be, then, that the way their muscles contract is more mammalian than crustacean, and how can their nerves be making growth factors that are involved in goldfish learning? Our best guess: conservation of traits that have existed since the Cambrian.

Electrophysiological recording of cholinergic events inextrication/contraction coupling in horseshoe crab skeletal muscle:

The typical arthropod excitatory neuromuscular junction (NMJ) releases glutamic acid.  While GLU also causes excitation/contraction in the HSC leg muscle, it does not cause an influx of sodium ions, so has been ruled out as the neurotransmitter.  Evidence from previous MQP's suggest that leg muscle is excited by Acetylcholine rather than amino acids; Acetylcholine antagonists paralyze Limulus leg muscle (MQP's by Malozzi, 05: Fuller, 06); antibodies against human acetylcholine receptors (AChR) produce transient paralysis in Limulus muscles (Fuller, 06; Vacher, 07).  The electrical events associated with acetylcoline, its agonists, and antagonists, have never been recorded.

The team will use bath-and iontophoretically applied ACH, while recording internal potetial of th muscle fiber with glass microelectrodes.  By varying external medium (e.g., choline chloride in place of NaC1) they will determine the ion fluxes involved. Native neurotransmitter release will be evoked by stimulation of leg nerve to detemine whether muscle membrane is excitable (supports action potentials as in most muscle) or inexcitable (acts via local junction potentials as in Crustacea).  Effects of Cholinergic agonists (carbamates, eserine) and antagonists (methyllycaconitine, a-conotoxin, succinylcholine chloride, botulinum toxin [presynaptic] during nerve stimulaton will be assessed by intracellular recording and strain measurements.

Techniques: dissection, microscopy, eletrophsiology.  Number of students: 3

Project Code: MB2-HC12

 

 

Phytoestrogen project:

Phytoestrogens are plant compounds that can mimic the effects of human steroids. Since traditional hormone replacement therapies for post menopausal women have several associated health concerns, including a potential increase in the risk of breast cancer, phytoestrogens are often marketed as a safe and natural alternative to estrogen. However, these products vary considerably and are not well characterized or tested. Using a well characterized estrogen responsive breast epithelial cell line, we will test the effects of available phytoestrogen products on cell growth. We will also begin to characterize the products, separate the components and test them individually and in combinations using the cell model system. Preliminary studies suggest that some of these compounds may have anti-proliferative or pro-apoptotic effects, which may make them attractive from a therapeutic standpoint.

Techniques: Cell culture, Plate assays, Protein assays, Western Blotting, Protein gels, HPLC
Preferred team size: 1-3 students
Project code: MB2-PE12

Genetics of Plant Cell Growth

  Plant growth is the result of the combined action of two fundamental processess, cell growth and cell division. Both of these processes require the coordination of several, sometimes overlapping, cellular avtivities.  Understanding the genetic basis of cell growth and cell division has been difficult in plants.  This is because the genes involved in these processes encode proteins which are essential for the plant development; hence when these genes are mutated the plants do not grow.  To overcome this problem this project aims at developing a collection of temperature sensitive mutants impaired in cell growth.  These mutants allow for normal protein function at room temperature, but block the protein function at a higher temperature.  The project will take advantage of a powerful and simple plant model organism, the moss Physcomitrella patens.  This moss grows predominantly in a haploid state, which simplifies genetic screening.  The availability of a temperature sensitive mutant collection will be an important genetic resource to help us understand how plant cells grow.

Project Code MB2-PP12

Techniques: Tissues culture, digital microscopy. genetic screens, computer assisted morphometry.

Students 2-4