Don't hold your breath
In a lab with 16 people, each doing many separate projects, discussing what I am working on doesn't do the lab justice. With that disclaimer, I will briefly explain my personal project for this summer.
I am doing in vitro studies in an attempt to characterize one aspect of the Numb protein in mice neural stem cells. Specifically, I create and maintain cell cultures with stem cells harvested from transgenic mice and stain them at various stages (arresting their growth) in order to visualize the presence and localization of various marker proteins. One of these markers, and the one we are most interested in, stains Numb. Using microscopy, we hope to visualize the localization of Numb in proliferating (especially dividing) cells and various types of differentiating cells.
So, why would we want to study that?
Numb has been thoroughly characterized in Drosophila and is known to localize into only one daughter cell of an asymmetrically dividing cell. This observation is correlated to cell fate, as Numb is partitioned into the cell that will differentiate into a mature neural cell. The Numb- cell on the other hand, remains a proliferative cell with stem cell-like properties. Now, keep in mind that all of this occurs in the adult brain--does it interest you to figure out how stem cells self-regenerate in an adult human brain? That is why studies are now turning to mice, the mammalian model organism. Unfortunately, Numb localization experiments in mice has produce variable and inconsistent results. To date, no one has successfully visualized Numb localization in mammalian postnatal neural stem cells. That is, we are unsure as to the function of Numb in mammals, which may or may not be similar to that in Drosophila.
Currently, my experiments have been malfunctioning in certain ways, because the assays are not definitive or perfected. Thus, I am trying out two different Numb markers and altering the protocol in order to achieve optimal staining and visualization results. Don't hold your breath for any conclusive results. It could be a while.
