Hi everyone! My name is Divia Shah, I am a senior here at Pitt and the Honors College studying Biology. I’m very excited to work as a Chancellor’s Undergraduate Research fellow this semester! I recently completed the Certificate in Conceptual Foundations of Medicine, and have minors in Chemistry and Film Studies. This semester, I decided to enroll in a filmmaking course where I am directing my own short film, which I am pretty excited about!
In terms of my future career goals, I hope to become a research physician one day and practice medicine alongside finding treatments for diseases. As this is my final semester at Pitt, I am gearing up for my upcoming research position, where I will be studying high-throughput assay screenings at the NCATS department of NIH. My current research actually has quite a few similarities with what I will be doing next year, so the skills I acquire during my time as a fellow will be very useful in the future! I also believe this CURF will provide me with a little preview on how my life may be like as a research physician, conducting independent research on a day-to-day basis.
I currently work in Dr. Zachary Freyberg’s lab, where we are interested in the dynamic expressions of proteins and neurotransmitters during Parkinson’s disease and aging. Parkinson’s disease is a neurological disorder that is characterized by the degeneration of dopamine neurons. In order to find efficient treatments for this disease, my lab mates and I are focusing on how to prevent dopamine neurons from deteriorating. We have previously found that an uptick in the expression of vesicular glutamate transporter (VGLUT), a protein that is found in neurons, is able to make dopamine neurons more resilient. This has been measured during Parkinson’s disease stressors. Interestingly, this upregulation is also seen during the developmental phase of mammals. Using fruit flies as the model organism, I will be elucidating a precise timeline of this developmental expression pattern. Additionally, despite ample evidence from mammalian models, no prior studies have researched a developmental fruit fly’s VGLUT expression patterns, so this will be the first of its kind!
To figure out at which larval stage a fruit fly increases their VGLUT expression, I will be measuring their concentrations using a luciferase assay. This assay measures the activity of proteins by quantifying the amount of light emitted, which is pretty cool to see. My first step is to dissect the fly larval brains, with each sample being from a different developmental stage. Then, after adding some reagents, I can quantify and compare the larva’s VGLUT expressions. In the long term, we hope to uncover any potential similarities between developing dopamine neurons expressing VGLUT and adult dopamine neurons expressing VGLUT under Parkinson’s disease. By doing so, we may be able to predict the early onset of Parkinson’s disease.
