Student Presenter(s): Devine Obasa, Caroline Garas
Faculty Mentor: Navin Pokala
Department: Life Sciences
School/College: College of Arts and Sciences, Long Island
The worm Caenorhabditis elegans is a powerful and widely used model organism for studying neuroscience, since it only has 300 neurons compared to the 86 billion neurons in humans. Our lab has developed histamine as a chemical-genetic reagent for controlling the activity of individual C. elegans neurons, via expression of histamine receptors from other organisms. However, since worms do not have mechanisms for removing histamine from synapses, its effects last too long. Therefore, we want to be able to reduce its levels. Organisms that use histamine have enzymes that are capable of degrading it. We want to put those enzymes into worms at specific locations (synapses between neurons) in order to degrade the histamine. Using PCR, we can clone the DNA that code for these enzymes and fuse them to proteins localized at the synapse.