summer 2015 projects
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Kate Emery joined the Dearolf lab in the summer of 2014. This summer, thanks to a Hendrix College Odyssey Grant, she is working on a project to determine the effects of a pregnant mouse's (termed perinatal) exercise on the citrate synthase activity of her offsprings' diaphragm muscles. This project is the result of a collaboration between Dr. Dearolf and Dr. Kevin Pearson at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Pearson and his colleagues discovered that perinatal exercise led to improved glucose disposal following an oral glucose challenge in male and female offspring (Carter et al., 2012). Since skeletal muscle is one of the main drivers of glucose metabolism, we hypothesize that the diaphragm muscles of the offspring of mothers that exercised will have greater citrate synthase activity than the muscles of the offspring of mothers that did not exercise during their pregnancies. |
| Olivia Sims started working in the Dearolf lab as a volunteer in the spring of 2015. This summer, with funding from the Hendrix College Odyssey Program, she is studying the neonatal guinea pig rectus thoracis, an accessory inspiratory muscle. She will be determining the percentages and diameters of type IIA and IIX fibers present in this muscle, as well as its myosin heavy chain expression pattern. These characteristics will then be compared to those of fetal muscles (59-days gestation) exposed to multi-course prenatal steroids and control fetal muscles (Schroeder et al., 2010; Brown et al., 2013) to determine if exposure to the steroids accelerated the development of the rectus thoracis muscle. |  |
Kate and Olivia will present the results of their research projects at the 2016 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) Meeting in Portland, OR.
