Muscle Research

Investigations into the realm of muscular conditions

Prithu Pareek

I was never really interested in biology or research until my freshman year biology class with Mrs. Fields. It was then that everything changed.

While the class itself was interesting, what most piqued my interest was the second semester that year when we were supposed to conduct an independent research project. In this project, we were tasked with designing, conducting, analyzing, and presenting an experiment of our choosing. Due to a muscular condition that I have, I was interested if I could study something along those lines. My friend and I reached out to one of my doctors who connected me to a professor at Harvard, Dr. Louis Kunkel, studying Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy using zebrafish models (SAPJE-like) of this disease created by genetic modification. This was perfect because it combined the muscle research with zebrafish which our school has a lab for.

And so our project began. After receiving some zebrafish model organisms that were heterozygous for the genetic mutation from this lab, we decided to test the effect of two small molecule drugs on both the survival and the degeneration of the muscle structure of affected, homozygous, offspring. Checking the muscle structure was extremely simple and could be done non-invasively under polarized light, as the fish are transparent for the first two to three weeks of their life. We hoped to see increased survival and less degeneration of the muscle in the treated fish. Unfortunately, we learned that in an experiment nothing ever works as planned. After unsuccessful breeding of our two fish and eventually the death of one of them the project became exponentially harder to complete. While we were not able to finish in time for the end of that class, we continued to work on the project until the end of my sophomore year, when we finally decided to move on to something else.

Although that project was inconclusive, it brought me into the realm of muscle research. I continued to stay in contact with the Kunkel lab at Harvard, eventually interning with them in the summer of 2017 as well as, currently, this summer. My first time working there, I helped conduct a study where we tested the effect of serotonin pathway modulators on affected fish. We wanted to see if the modulation of this pathway via small molecule drugs, could improve the condition.* After my internship, I was able to present my work at various conferences including the Society for Neuroscience in DC, and the Society for Developmental Biology in Woods Hole, MA - where I gave a talk. I attended these conferences with a group of kids from my school who are all part of a club focused on conducting biological research experiments.

This year the research the research that I am doing in the lab is more personal to me as we are studying congenital myopathies, which is the broader category for what my condition is. At the moment I we are studying a new model organism of a congenital myopathy to see if we can figure out a phenotype that corresponds to the human disease, and allows us to study it using this organism.

Back at my school, I am in the process of trying to set up a line of SAPJE-like zebrafish so that other students can also use them for experiments, and further the research on these types of conditions.

I hope that one day I will be able to contribute to a cure for a muscular disorder.

*There is a paper on this project being published currently under review.

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