2010 Blogs

Re-Wiring Brains! Research at its Finest!

09/13/2010

I am writing this post in response to a comment in my other post titled ME.

I have had many opportunities to research while I have been at IUE.  This is awesome, incredible, sweet, cool, and any other words you can think of or look up in a thesaurus that have these same meanings!  One of the cooler things I have done was my research with Hitesh Kathuria.  I did this with another student IUE student, Zack Robbins (to be honest I don't know how to spell Zack's first name).  During this research we could control the wiring of Brain cells. We did this byplaying with the proteins that control synapse formations in fly brains.  As of now the procedure we have developed only works in fly brains because we have yet to find a similar protein in humans.

At this moment in time I would like to invite Zack and Hitesh to chime in and explain things if they can or clarify some of the things that I write.  This is a very confusing process so if I accidently write something wrong I apologize because it has been a while since I have researched with them.  I took a break from the research over the summer.

Anyway, what we did was we used a protein  that would normally tell a neuron cell to attach to another neuron cell that has the same protein on it that is slightly different however.  We lopped off the end of that protein and connected the end of another protein to it.  This new protein that we created will attach to proteins that are the exact same as it.  So then we expressed that protein in two parts of the the fly brain that would normally not connect.  When we expressed this protein in in two parts of the brain that would not normally connect we then took a look at the fly brain and saw that connections were being made where they would not normally form!

That part is hard to understand and hard to explain as well.  Its hard to do in person let alone in written word.

THE COOL PART

The cool part is though that this is the start of cyborgs.  We can use this technology to maybe control the flight of a fly and send a fly into a room first before a soldier to see if it is safe.  The fly would not be noticed and we could get all the intel we want.  OR .... We could use this to attach human nerves to computer chips.  Using this we could attach a prosthetic arm to a person who lost there arm.  Then they could just think like a person who had an arm to move their arm.  The computer chip would receive signals from the humans nervous system and interpret the signals just like a normal muscle would and then flex or relax accordingly.  Very cool stuff!!!  Of course all of this stuff happening will be in the very distant future but we are on the cutting edge at IUE.

If you have anymore questions please ask.  I tried to explain the best I could.  Hitesh and Zack please comment and clarify any part you guys would like to!

Hitesh

Dr. Hitesh Kathuria

PS this is a very quick overview.  The techniques to do the above stated procedure is equally amazing as the results.  Recombineering and other processes are used.  Please contact Hitesh Kathuria if you are interested in researching this or other subjects similar.  He is a busy man though so be patient.

Research opportunities are very abundant at IUE.  Take advantage of this!  This is a huge advantage of being at a small school.  Most schools will not allow research at such an early stage.  Many schools will only allow seniors to do research and even they have heavy competition to research.

Thanks guys!  Tune into my next blog! It is a little less professional but should be lots of fun!  It will be coming online the 14th late at night!