Michelle's Project Page

Who:  I am from Westminster, Colorado and came to the U for the numerous opportunities presented here, including ACCESS, as well as to be more independent and explore life away from home! When I have free time I enjoy dance, video games, and art.

My scientific interests:  Ever since middle school I have been fascinated with science, especially organismal physiology. There’s so much to how an organism functions and reacts and when you apply that to humans it’s interesting how every being lives a different life based on “the way they’re built.” This is why I’m interested in going into the medical field to help others through diagnosis and treatment so that people can thrive as much as possible in their lives.

Academic goals:  I am studying biology with an emphasis in anatomy and physiology for my undergraduate degree. I have thoroughly enjoyed being in my ACCESS lab and will continue working on this project. After earning my degree I plan to attend medical school.

Career goals:  In the future, I would like to be a pediatric orthopedist giving quality healthcare to underserved and underrepresented populations around the world.

The nervous system is intricate; it involves multitudes of neurons that can lead to complex behaviors. The African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis , has sex-specific vocalizations that are independent of the respiratory system which allows for a clearer look at the relationship between neural activity and behavior. Motoneurons that innervate skeletal muscles release acetylcholine as neurotransmitters. Previously, unusual feedback pathways from the motoneurons to the premotor neurons were discovered in the central vocal pathways of X. laevis . Here, we hypothesize that along with acetylcholine, glutamate is also used as a neurotransmitter by the vocal motor neurons to drive feedback neurons in the central vocal pathways of X. laevis . To test this hypothesis, it is necessary to: 1) establish a method for labeling vesicular glutamate transporters (VGluT1) expressed selectively by the glutamatergic neurons in the frog brain and 2) double stain for glutamate and acetylcholine. My project deals with the first step. Through immunohistochemistry we stain the tissue and label for VGluT1, a transporter protein that moves glutamate across a membrane, using rabbit anti-VGluT1 as the primary antibody and donkey anti-rabbit conjugated with a fluorophore as the secondary antibody. Initial attempts to stain for glutamate using two different primary antibodies have been unsuccessful despite an extra step we added to enhance our chance of success and require further troubleshooting. Once my project is complete and glutamate has been successfully labelled for, we would then use immunohistochemistry to double stain for acetylcholine and glutamate to look for possible co-transmission.

Michelle Tin Research Poster.pdf Download Michelle Tin Research Poster.pdf