Project Description
The purpose of this project is to understand the effect of various ligands on the quaternary structure of several G protein coupled receptors and other receptors in living cells. My lab has developed several methods for such studies, and most recently developed a method -- 2-dimensional Spatial Intensity Distribution Analysis --, which relies on imaging cells expressing fluorescently-tagged receptors, using a well established theoretical procedure to determine the brightness and concentration of the receptors populating each pixel in an image, and building two dimensional histograms of frequencies of occurrence of molecular complexes with certain brightness and concentration. The 2D distributions of intensities allow us to distinguish between receptor complexes of different sizes and assess how the complex size is modulated by the receptor concentration.
Tasks and Responsibilites
Our research would benefit tremendously if certain portions of the analysis will become fully automatic. The student will write codes using Python and/or C++ to add to our toolkit for analysis of fluorescence intensity fluctuations detected in fluorescence intensity micro-graphs, and then will use the software to analyze images that the student and other members of my research group will acquire. The student will also learn how to prepare cell cultures expressing receptors of interest with fluorescent proteins attached to them, capture images of those samples using optical microspectroscopy developed by my research group, and analyze them using his computer program. The student will also participate in interpretation of the results, preparing figures, and writing short reports.
Desired Qualifications
None listed