It’s been a productive year for the lab: two theses defended, with Rebecca’s just around the corner. Join us at 3pm, Sept 12th in the Mid-Campus Center, Room 257, and help cheer her on while learning about some cutting edge brain-transcriptomics!
Rebecca’s thesis work has focused on developing an executing a method, called SynapTRAP, to selectively isolate RNA from neuronal synaptic membranes. Neurons have long, myriad ‘arms’ which they use to communicate, but which RNAs and consequent proteins are localized to these arms remains mostly unexplored–especially at the level of neuron subtypes. Rebecca’s work presents her successful design and run of this method across all neurons of the mouse brain, and further explores synapse-specific RNAs within glutamatergic and GABAergic neuronal populations.
We’ll be sad to see Rebecca go. While all scientists are willing to help one another out, but Rebecca has always been especially willing to go the extra mile–especially patiently– for questions about even the simplest tasks. Likewise, she had a strong propensity for bringing doughnuts into lab without occasion or forewarning, keeping us bright-eyed and glycemically-sated through long and stressful days.
Rebecca’s future plans aren’t yet concrete, but she’s keen on heading for the private sector, especially in areas like analysis of consumer genotype-phenotype data. Whatever she pursues, she will bring ample knowledge and methodologic skill to the table.
We’ll see you (and Rebecca) next Wednesday!