Honors Research Paper Sample

My Honors research is a composite of work done both here at Howard University and at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Here on campus, I am in the laboratory of Dr. Mark Burke, an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics of Howard University’s College of Medicine. I began in the lab at the beginning of this year, where my primary responsibility was to learn and develop the relevant skills and techniques to succeed within his laboratory. These included: primate brain tissue processing (sectioning and slide mounting/dehydration), immunohistochemistry, tissue staining and keeping an updated lab notebook. In the spring of this year, I was accepted into the Amgen Scholars Program, which gave me the opportunity to conduct my own research project at the National Institutes of Health over the summer. I was in the lab of Dr. Hans Ackerman in the Sickle Cell Branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the nature of my project focused on the expression of a tight junction protein known as

Claudin-5 is localized at the cell–cell boundaries of brain capillary endothelial cells, serving as a size regulator of molecule permeability. In previous studies, claudin-5 deficient mice have been generated. In the brains of these mice, the development and morphology of blood vessels were not altered, showing no bleeding or edema. However, tracer experiments and magnetic resonance imaging revealed that in these mice, the BBB against small molecules (<800 D), but not larger molecules, was selectively affected (Nitta et al). We hypothesize that there will be significant differences in the presence and/or functionality of the claudin-5 protein in the brain blood vessel endothelium of SIV-positive versus healthy control primate brain samples. Using SIV-infected macaque brain tissue samples, immunohistochemical analysis was