News
With our first lab baby coming soon, we celebrated Naureen’s baby shower with lovely decorations and happy vibes. The room was filled with food, fun, laughter, and lots of love to shower Naureen and her little one on the way with gifts and cheers. Congratulations Naureen on becoming a soon-to-be mom!
Evan Cirone, a sophomore studying Cell Biology and Neuroscience joins our lab to work on identifying connectivity between clock neurons and Pars-Intercerebralis neuron populations! Welcome Evan!
Flying in all the way from Japan, we welcome Keisuke Fukumura, our first postdoc! His role in the lab will be to investigate how unfavorable nutritional status affects circadian function and aging in Drosophila!
Today, the Barber Lab traveled to UPenn for the Chronobiology and Sleep Institute’s Annual Research Symposium 2022! We got to hear lots of great talks about circadian control and sleep function and effects in neurological diseases. Congratulations to our graduate student, Naureen Hameed and undergraduate student, Akanksha Mathivanan also won awards for “Best Poster Presentation”!
Seanna Kelly, a first-year graduate student joins our lab for her first rotation to work on improving the auxin-inducible gene expression system (AGES) by incorporating an improved auxin inducible degron (AID2) technology involving mutated TIR1 receptors and use of the auxin analog 5-Ph-IAA!
Akanksha wins an award for her first research poster presentation on investigating how Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) induces sleep dysregulation in fruit flies at the Aresty Summer Science Annual Symposium 2022! Impressive accomplishment for a freshman who joined the lab just 10 weeks ago! Over the summer, she injured flies at different voltages to induce various severities of TBI in flies. After injury, their activity was recorded using Drosophila Activity Monitoring systems. From this data, the flies’ circadian rhythm strength, period length, and activity, and most interestingly, sleep was uncovered over a 7-day period!
Khushi was awarded the Division of Life Sciences Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (DLS SURF) 2022. To conclude her fellowship, Khushi presented a poster on her project: the development of a new gene expression system that allows for the controlling of Drosophila genes without having to use temperature sensitive proteins. Khushi and her team uses an auxin(major plant hormone)-inducible degree system that can remove the need for a temperature shift in gene expression experiments. In collaboration with the Southall Lab, they were able to monitor how this system affects gene expression with GFP, a green fluorescence protein, as well as examine its behavioral effects and whether we are able to control behavior. During the summer, Khushi and the team ran experiments that monitored the recovery of Drosophila from auxin, as well as experiments that measure the effects of CRISPR when paired with this gene expression system. Congrats again Khushi!
Akanksha Mathivanan, a sophomore studying Cell Biology and Neuroscience joins our lab through the Aresty Summer Science program! She will work on uncovering the effects of Traumatic Brain Injury on sleep and circadian rhythms in Drosophila melanogaster!
