Date of Submission

Summer 2019

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Biology

Project Advisor 1

Mike Tibbets

Project Advisor 2

Brook Jude

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Mechansenosry hair cells are only produced once in our lifetime and each individual only has a limited number of these hair cells, in the inner ear cochlea we have about 10,000 hair cells, and if hair cells are lost due to damage, they are lost forever. This permanent loss is the root cause of functional deficits and causes deafness. Zebrafish models can provide insight into human hearing disease and their mechanisms and have several advantages over mammalian models. Both hair cell damage and regeneration has become a primary field of research to understand the development and differentiation. The fish’s lateral line contains hair cells in sensory patches known as neuromasts. Neuromast ultimately develop 15-20 hair cells surrounded by two accessory cell types, supporting and mantle cells. My research investigates if E-cadherin knockdown is responsible for the regeneration of hair cells through Ectopic expression that results in death of mantle cells. The expression of E-cad can be harmful to the embryos and can deter neuromast development, therefore Mo-agents essentially need to be microinjected into the tail fin of an organized adult size fish. A protocol is revaluated to determine the best accuracy in delivering agents into the neuromast cells. Results show death of mantle cells post 24-hour injection and raise a question of whether B-cadherin is essential to mantle survival and is there a future for knockdown experiments.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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