Investigating tau protein aggregation in sporadic Alzheimer's disease.
Investigating tau protein aggregation in sporadic Alzheimer's disease
Tau aggregation is one of the traditional neuropathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease, as well as a number of other neurodegenerative conditions known as tauopathies. Using a biosensor assay developed by researchers at UT Southwestern we investigated tau aggregation kinetics using a live-cell imaging approach coupled with machine-learning based image segmentation and analysis in patients with sporadic Alzheimer's disease and mouse models of tauopathy. This work was published in Nature Medicine .
Images taken from Dujardin et al., 2020 Nat. Med. and Takeda, 2019 Front. Neurosci.
Resarching the interactions between transcription factors and DNA using Xenopus laevis oocytes.
Resarching the interactions between transcription factors and DNA using Xenopus laevis oocytes.
The achaete-scute homolog (ASH) protein is an essential transcription factor for proper nervous system development. The ASH protein is part of a family of basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) proteins which bind to E-box promoter regions of the DNA to facilitate DNA transcription of genes downstream of the promoter. As a part of the Gurdon Laboratory , I used the oocytes of the Xenopus laevis (African Clawed Frogs) I investigated the binding of ASH to mutated versions of the E-box region and found that while mutations may significantly alter expression of the downstream genes regulated by the E-box promoter, mutations do not significantly alter binding of the ASH protein to the promoter region.
Modeling historical changes in pediatric cancer mortality rates.
Modeling historical changes in pediatric cancer mortality rates.
Mortality rates for some of the most common pediatric cancers including leukemias, lymphomas, and central nervous system cancers increased in the first half of the 20th century and declined in the second half of the century, to present day. While this decline may be attributed to the introduction of effective pediatric chemotherapies, especially in the 1960s, we at the Thilly Lab identified a previously unreported decline in the presently less common pediatric cancers, including lower gastrointestinal cancer. We have modeled these mortality rates using the two-hit hypothesis model of carcinogenesis, amended to account for the discovery and hypothesis that the cells at risk for generating cancers are mutator/hypermutable metakaryotic stem cells. The data for these resuls can be found here , along with a MATLAB application allowing for at-home analysis of the dataset with the amended two-hit model.
Investigating the fMRI patterns of schizophrenic patients and their unaffected siblings.
Modeling the rheological properties of non-Newtonian fluids.
Modeling the rheological properties of non-Newtonian fluids using fractional calculus
Non-Newtonian fluids are difficult to quantitatively model, and have generally been described using qualitative terms. Likewise, quantitative spring and dashpot models (and the more complex Maxwell and Kelvin-Voigt models) fail to accurately model the complex behavior of these fluids under shear strain and stress. Previous work has thus described a new paramter: the springpot which employs fractional calculus to simplify the previous models and accurately describe viscoelastic behavior. I created a computational model with a user-friendly GUI to model rheological data of non-Newtonian fluids and gives the springpot parameters to accurately describe such complex fluids and tested the model on honey, nectar and pudding.