A Sampler of Future Posts: December and Spring Semester

The Nishikawa lab & Co. have been busy the last few weeks and we intend to keep on pushing right into the break. Kari, who is working on figuring out the change in the stiffness of active titin in mutant mice when compared to wild type mice (via a “shivering frequency” experiment) is almost done with her shivering data and her observations are raising some eyebrows. Kit (who is trying to understand how frogs can jump out of water) has just wrapped up frog jumping and after one more minor experiment, he will be ready to prepare a manuscript. Both of them are using this data in prep of their master thesis works. Once they have worked out the bugs, I will let you guys in on the results! A brief intro on their work can be found in earlier posts.

Our post-docs (Cinnamon and Jenna) both have their author hats on as they finish up their manuscripts (and experiments) on characterizing active-titin deficient mutant mice muscles on a force lever. I will try to write a post dedicated to their work in the next few weeks. Tentative results seem to support the Winding Filament Hypothesis on activated titin.

I finally started my salamander research! 2 weeks ago, I received 7 D.fuscus from Lisa Whitenack @ Allegheny College (they are adorable). As we speak I am finishing up characterizing their skin and passive muscle/element elastic properties to their C-start jumping mechanism. I will have some results to talk about next semester. In other news, I think that I have wrapped up a separate salamander project on tail loss effects. After I finish up the manuscript I will summarize it here. I should mention that I took on an undergraduate researcher, Megan Keenom. She is very capable and her work has allowed my work to run efficiently.

Next semester, we have a new PhD student coming in to begin work on incorporating our titin model into leg prostheses. We will be getting a new post doc to work on this project as well. Once I learn exactly how they intend to do this, I will be sure to pass it on into the blog.
Rene, who is our ex-lab tech will be continuing in the lab as a masters student!

The Nishikawa lab is going, in numbers, to the SICB national conference in San Francisco January 3-8th.

Check back for in-depth posts of everything above! Thanks for reading!

A.Hessel

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Conferences and Collaborations Part II

The Nishikawa lab was well represented at the 5th annual AzPS conference held at the U of A, Tuscon campus. Rene F, Kari T (Masters student), Jenna Monroy (post Doc), Cinnamon Pace (post Doc), Shane S (undergrad) and myself presented either talks or posters. It is great to travel as a lab once in a while, it allows the group to converse on topics other then science, which I feel brings the lab closer together. We brought out A-game as well. Shane won 1st prize for best undergrad poster, and Cinnamon won 3rd place for post-doc talks.

Some conference highlights was hearing about the work Kari is completing for her thesis, trying to link shiver frequencies in in mice with the “stiffness” of the muscle protein titin. Jennifer Vranish  (PhD candidate, UA) is doing some fantastic work on sleep apnea (snoring counts!). She is attempting to tone up the throat structures that usually “sag” while we sleep, limiting airway size (aka snoring or apnea). She is having subjects build this tone by having them suck on a straw (like one would when drinking a thick milkshake.) Early results on the control group are promising, and I am looking forward to hearing the results from the apnea group.

The Granzier lab (UA), also presented in numbers. They also work on the titin protein, but instead of skeletal muscle, they look at its function in cardiac muscle. I feel that we have a friendly competition with this lab group. We critically review each others posters and presentations, but in the end it makes both of our research work stronger, so I think it is healthy. I think that understanding other isoforms of titin are important because the change in function may shine some light on the purpose of titin in specific muscle types. The Granzier lab has some new grad students working with skeletal titin, perhaps our lab should consider working with cardiac titin as well.

The keynote lecturers were B. Walker (UNM) and P. Hoyer (UA). Both of these researchers have been working on their talk’s topic for over 20 years, and I found it awesome to listen to how the projects evolved over that time into what they became. Walker talked about “Novel mechanisms of vascular control in chronic hypoxia”, and Hoyer discussed “VCD (plastic byproduct) as a tool for understanding ovotoxicity and modeling menopause”. I suggest every person go to their lab websites and read up on this fascinating work.

In other news, I was elected (though unopposed) to the executive council of the society. I am hoping to keep NAU in the loop since we seem to be so far away from the action in Tuscon. I think that we should focus on getting our Exercise physiologists out to this conference. There work falls right into the scope of this conference.

thanks for reading!

A. Hessel

Conferences and collaborations (Part 1)

The past month started and ended with some great conferences.

The first weekend of October, I represented my lab at the Society for Integrative and comparative biology division of vertebrate morphology southwest regional meeting (SICB DVM SW). This was the founding meeting, so no one really knew how big it was going to be. So, when we all met at CS San Bernadino, I was not sure how it was going to run. Turns out, a lot of the movers and shakers in my field are stationed in labs in the Southwest United States, so the conference (with only 50 participants) was loaded with insightful talks and posters. A lot of “young” labs were able to come and showcase their new toys, in hopes of sparking collaborative efforts with others in the region. David Lee at UNLV showcased his new 3D X-ray set up that allows any animal to perform a movement while we view it’s bones system in real time. Very useful for biomechanic’s research.The Higham lab at UC Riverside presented some interesting work on the lizard’s mechanism for negotiating tight turns. The Azizi lab at UC Irvine is working on the toad’s landing mechanism (why does it not fall over when it lands?) They believe that the eccentric contraction of landing are strongly controls by the molecular muscle protein titin (which happens to be my labs main interest right now!) Ivo Ros (Biewener lab, Harvard) presented his dissertation work on figuring out how pigeons make tight turns (seems to use the same principals as a helicopter).  Another lab at UC Irvine presented an assortment of work on predator detection in fish when the predator attacks in a blind spot (the lateral lines plays a big role). Roy Heng at Cal Poly tech demonstrated how frogs frogs build up potential energy in their jaw pre-opening, so that when the mouths, the tongue can catapult out.

The keynote lecturer was David Carrier from the University of Utah. He presented some fascinating studies that looks at if human evolution was geared to be fighters (hands can make a fist, chimps cant, alignment of bones, ability to grapple due to bipedalism etc).

the conference was help in a small lecture hall, so the Q and A session was more of a forum discussion, then a direct question to the talker. I found this a really efficient way to give criticism to the study (and make it better! Or ask new questions). I encourage all my Southwest DVM counterparts to join me next year and join this conference’s critical mass of high quality labs/personals.

In Part II I will discuss the conference that I just got back from, the Arizona State Physiological Society (AzPS) meeting at the U of A, Tucson.

P.S.-I presented my past, present, and future directions on the salamander research.
I encourage all of you to Google these other labs and contact them if you are interested in the work. I can tell you that most of them love collaborating, or simply talking about there work with whoever is interested.

-A.Hessel