Shaistah's Project Page

Who:  My name is Shaistah and I am from Sandy, Utah. In my free time, I enjoy playing tennis, bike riding, and spending time with friends and family.

My scientific/engineering interests: My interest in medicine has always been rooted in my desire to volunteer my time as a physician serving the most vulnerable populations abroad. 

Academic goals:  I’m a second year pursuing an honors double major in health, society, and policy and biology along with minors in chemistry and medical humanities. With my degrees, I aim to focus on both the humanities and scientific aspects of medicine. I hope to continue working in a research lab, thus advancing my knowledge of the biological sciences.

Career goals:  I plan to pursue medical school after graduating. I hope to help those who are under-served receive quality medical care and attention.

In neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, synapses stop functioning and standard pathways for degradation of aggregated proteins also stop working. Protein aggregates should be degraded in the lysosome, the cell’s main degradative organelle. Utilizing crosses and CRISPR gene editing, we created new worm strains of the nematode C. elegans with fluorescent proteins marking lysosomes and also synapses, providing us with a view of synaptic degradation pathways occurring in a neuron. Our goal was to understand how neurons function when their synapse is damaged and how they use degradative organelles such as the lysosome to tend to the synapses. When we observed the localization of lysosomes, we saw lysosome-related organelles which probed synapses, which we named “surveillants.” The lack or degradation of function in a synapse is one of the most pertinent issues facing neurodegenerative disease research. A better understanding of how the lysosome and its related organelles interact with damaged synapses will allow for the advancement of new therapies to combat these diseases.

Tagging Lysosomal Proteins to Understand Synaptic Degeneration Download Tagging Lysosomal Proteins to Understand Synaptic Degeneration