Personal Information:
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Date of Birth: May 12, 1979 Place of Birth: Dover, New Hampshire High School: Pentucket Regional, West Newbury, Massachusetts Undergraduate Education: B.S., Chemistry, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Favorite Activities: Mountain biking, playing guitar, baseball, weightlifting, fly fishing |
Research:
My research focuses on designing and isolating short nucleic acid molecules that preferentially bind a specific neurotransmitter. These molecules are identified using a process known as SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment), which screens a large combinatorial library of nucleic acids for sequences that bind their target (in this case, a neurotransmitter). Binding sequences are amplified and re-screened under increasingly stringent conditions, eventually yielding nucleic acid molecules with both high affinity and high specificity towards the neurotransmitter of interest. Our selection process utilizes a neurotransmitter-functionalized surface that we synthesize on-site and a chromatographic-type separation process (see figure 1). The end goal is to develop microscale biosensors for in vivo detection of neurotransmitters.
We also use Relative Quantitative RT-PCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction) as an analysis of RNA transcripts in brain tissue. Total cellular RNA is extracted from tissue and mRNA is selectively converted to the corresponding DNA enzymatically. Segments of these DNA molecules are amplified and electrophoretically separated (see figure 2) from the reaction mixture; the presence or absence of a particular DNA product will provide information on the abundance of the transcript in the tissue being studied. This method can be made quantitative by using a computer program to integrate the separated DNA bands and compare the transcript-specific bands to an internal standard (see figure 3).
Posters and Publications: