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Graduate Student News

Graduate Students Win Research Awards for Aging with Worms

Mizanur Rahman was awarded the Student Investigator Space Flight Award at the 2016 meeting of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research, held in Cleveland, OH. Mizan is supervised by Dr. Siva Vanapalli and successfully defended his Ph.D. this past fall. His dissertation focused on developing a microfluidic platforms for muscle strength and aging investigations in the model organism C. elegans. Maintenance of physical fitness, especially, muscle strength is essential for an individual's health and well-being. Loss of muscle strength alone is a prognostic indicator for a variety of disorders including dynapenia, cancer, cardiovascular and neuromuscular diseases. Although it is straightforward to record muscle strength in people, it is not feasible to conduct whole life studies looking at the impact of genetics on muscle health.

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Promisingly, prospective life-long studies can be accomplished in the millimeter-sized roundworm C. elegans. The nematode body wall muscles have similarities to human muscle and strikingly deteriorate with age similar to humans. However, traditionally all assays on C. elegans are carried out in agar plate manually and severely limits throughput. To understand the biology of muscle aging in a high-throughput manner, Mizan developed a micro-pillar based microfluidic device (NemaFlex) and established a robust protocol to measure the strength of C. elegans, and he configured the device into a lifespan measurement device called NemaLife. Mizan used NemaLife and focused his observation on standard healthspan readouts such as strength, locomotion and pharyngeal pumping (cardiac health) virtually from 'womb to tomb' providing insights into how physiological changes occur during development and declines with age. This approach provided the first direct evidence of muscle strength loss due to aging, similar to dynapenia in humans.

Ph.D. student Jennifer Hewitt, also supervised by Dr. Vanapalli, won second place in the graduate student poster competition at the same 2016 meeting of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research. Jennifer is working on a project with NASA to help better understand the biological changes that occur in astronaut muscle in microgravity. While it is well known that astronaut muscle atrophies and becomes weaker without gravity, the mechanism for these changes is not well understood. To probe the biology behind these genetic changes, she uses the NemaFlex platform that Mizan developed to measure the muscle strength in C. elegans. Jennifer, along side Mizan, who is now working in the laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher, are working to validate NemaFlex for spaceflight studies, with the end goal of sending NemaFlex and C. elegans to the International Space Station. This will allow analysis of C. elegans gene expression in microgravity to be associated with a hypothesized decrease in muscle strength, thereby showing a set of genes that may be responsible for weaker muscles in space.