Zebrafish imaging moves forward with recent NIH grant
Multidisciplinary team sharpens UGA focus on mathematical biology
Even before they began moving into their new lab and office spaces in the $40 million Coverdell Research Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, Andrew Sornborger and Jim Lauderdale were seeing signs that their imaging collaboration with Charles Keith was yielding promising results. The only problem was, some of those results turned out not to be what they initially seemed.
“We had a major setback last January,” Sornborger recalls, “and we had to completely rethink where we were.” The research team of Sornborger, a joint-appointment between mathematics and engineering, Lauderdale and Keith, both from cellular biology, began working together on imaging neural activity in zebrafish soon after Sornborger arrived at UGA in 2003. Understanding the cellular mechanisms underlying the development of the vertebrate central nervous system is one of the major challenges of neurobiology; rapidly-developing transparant zebrafish embryos are ideal for these detailed studies. The problem which arose earlier this year was one of data analysis and it sent the group into new directions in developing their methods and confirmed the benefits of combining multidisciplinary research expertise.
Finding mistakes is an important part of successful scientific experimentation; what Keith, Lauderdale and Sornborger had interpreted as a response to stimulus in the zebrafish actually turned out to be motion. This realization led them back to their beginnings, analyzing zebra fish neurons in cultured cells, mindful of the new constraints, and finding ways to check and control for them. Now the group is moving forward again on the basis of two new papers supporting their new methods, subtly illustrating how different disciplines must necessarily stretch into and support each other. Analysis and observation offer the irreplaceable third leg to experimentation that allows for finding, correcting and this case using mistakes to move forward.
“Now we know we’re seeing real neural stimulation,” Sornborger says, and they have discovered better methods for stimulating it without the motion. “We know how to do the right experiment and we’re going to go back and do a series of those now,” he says.
And the group will not be going back to the lab alone, figuratively or otherwise. Their work has been funded by a two-year, $400,000 NIH National Institute of Bioimaging and Bioengineering grant. Two graduate students in engineering and one in cellular biology, one post-doc and three undergraduates are presently working with the team on the grant, which itself signals a progression of support for the team’s work. The NIH grant was given on the basis of research supported by a UGA Engineering grant, which itself was a product of work supported by a faculty research grant.
Nanostructure Fabrication – Progress on a Tiny Scale
While Nano-scale research had seized the public imagination as the next great frontier, UGA engineers steadily move forward with perfecting advanced techniques.
Before they can become fibers or fuel cells, self-dosing drugs or inter-capillary diagnostic tools and sensors, nanostructures must be characterized, stabilized and optimized for their production and behavior at a scale that is barely understood. The research team of Yiping Zhao, Guigen Zhang and William Kisaalita, working through a $1 million NSF grant to enhance the sensitivity of nanostructures, is helping nanoscience transition from possibilities to capabilities, one tiny step at a time.
“If you understand the fundamental science and relationship between nanostructures and the sensor, you can always engineer some way to improve the sensitivity,” says Yiping Zhao, UGA physics professor and Faculty of Engineering member. The team relies on Zhao’s background in fabrication and Zhang and Kisaalita’s emphasis on biology to chart innovative new directions in the uses of nanostructures. It was just this sort of collaboration envisioned by the National Science Foundation in its Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) grants program, which has funded the group’s work since 2003.
For a wide array of applications, the team is working to perfect nanostructure self-assembly with techniques that will allow for reliable, easy to control and inexpensive fabrication. Enzyme immobilization and protein absorption, for example, are keys elements toward any application involving nanostructures in the human body, and the team has developed flow cells to test their functionality in electrochemical detection. From optical characterization to nanostructure-liquid interaction, the team is developing the tools to put these leading edge ideas into practice.
“Because it’s still in its infancy, engineers are facing great challenges in working at nanoscale,” Zhang says of the team’s unique opportunity to combine expertise from different disciplines, made possible by the collaborative atmosphere at UGA engineering. The team leveraged a combination of internal and external support to open a Nano/Micro fabrication lab in 2004. The collaboration also allows for a variety of opportunities for students, from PhDs to undergraduates, to gain experience working and thinking on a once-unimaginable level.
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