Spencer Bella and Dr. Jeffrey Edwards, Physiology and Developmental Biology

Participating in mentored research funded by ORCA has again provided me with valuable research experience and taught me valuable lessons about the research process. Although due to certain setbacks my project was not able to progress to the point of conclusive results, the results we have at this point may show support of our hypothesis. Other members of Dr. Edwards’ lab will continue the project as I have graduated and am pursuing further education elsewhere.

My project involved investigating the cellular processes underlying learning and memory in the rodent brain. One process known as long-term depression (LTD) involves the weakening of a chemical synapse between brain cells. My project involved the electrical induction of LTD in mouse brain slices. We investigated specifically the role of a receptor known as GPR55. We hypothesized that the application of lysophosphatidylinositol (LPI), a chemical which binds to and activates GPR55 would lead to an overall reduction of LTD. In other words, LPI should prevent the synapse from being weakened as much as would be observed under control conditions.

One setback we encountered was difficulty in obtaining healthy brain slices. The technician in our lab responsible for slicing the brains was recently hired at the onset of the project and often had difficulty with providing the lab with healthy slices to use. After a month or so, our technician had reached a higher level of mastery of the slicing technique and we were able to get results more consistently.
My project also involved the use of genetically engineered mice that lacked the GPR55 receptor. This placed some limitations on the timetable in which we could perform the experiments as some of the mice needed to mature before they could be used.

Although these setbacks prevented the project from progressing as far as was hoped, we were able to obtain some results that may show support for our hypothesis. I have included graphs showing some promising results of the experiments I performed. Further experimentation is required to provide enough results to yield statistical significance, if any. So far our results exhibit a great deal of variability and inconsistency. Collecting more data should allow us to determine what variation is due to actual differences between control conditions and conditions in which GPR55 is activated and what variation is due to chance alone.