July 2024: Summer REU students present at the Mizzou Summer Research Forum

By performing classic fly genetics, senior Elijah Sidiropoulos, together with Audrey Garoutte (B.S. ‘24) helped overcome a major technical hurdle facing our Lab. Dan shared, “We’ve discovered that Inscuteable, a protein well-characterized in the developing nervous system, is also expressed in fruit fly oocytes. What is it doing there? We can’t address that problem without first using recombination to generate the right insc mutant chromosome. It takes a bit of labor, some patience, and close attention to details. Elijah learned how to carry out the relevant crosses, and we got the chromosome we need. He capped it off with an outstanding poster presentation.”

Biochemistry major Hannah Rice (left) and Health Sciences major Hope Schust (right) worked closely together to tackle an important question for our Lab. As Dan explained: “We know that the evolutionarily-conserved protein Fas2 (in flies) drives the reintegration of epithelial cells after division. How does it work? One way to find out, said Dan, is to check whether Fas2-interacting proteins are involved in reintegration. “Hope and Hannah tested two good candidates using fly genetics and confocal microscopy. Intriguingly, neither candidate appears to participate in reintegration! We are delighted by these results; they demonstrate that Hope and Hannah took a careful approach to science and also give us even more confidence in another candidate interacting factor.”

Dan called Hannah “a terrific junior scientist - curious, bright, and determined” and lauded her oral presentation at the Summer Forum as “phenomenal.”

“Hope has an outstanding ability to communicate complex scientific concepts clearly and engagingly and put together an impressive poster presentation,” shared Tara. “It has been a pleasure hosting Hope in the lab, and we wish her all the very best for what is sure to be a bright future.”