During the poster session of this retreat, we were given the opportunity to share our current results dealing with the dissection of MMP-14’s role in neural crest migration.
Receiving feedback from professors, experiments will be repeated and methods altered to produce results that could potentially be used for a scientific paper. The following advice was given to us, and we will look for ways to incorporate this into our future tests.
- Imaging should have consistent background color
- Instead of comparing morpholino-injected embryos with their uninjected half, comparison should be done against embryos injected with only beta-galatosidase to control for the variable of simply injecting with something causing abnormalities
- Following injection with morpholino, a western blot test should be performed to add additional evidence for presence of MMP-14 protein translated and use this to assess along with morphological abnormalities in embryo
- Research into the use of CRISPR to more faithfully knock down MMP-14 expression in lieu of morpholino injection
- A quantifiable judgment scale should be used, in which the migration of neural crest streams is measured based on number of pixels in length from images taken
- A lower concentration of Prinomastat hydrochloride should be used to rule out the possibility of general toxicity causing abnormalities in neural crest migration. Possibly find a concentration in which at least 70% of all embryos are affected, similar to an LD-50.