The Backyard Brains 2018 Summer Research Fellowship is coming to a close, but not before we get some real-world scientific experience in! Our research fellows are nearing the end of their residency at the Backyard Brains lab, and they are about to begin their tenure as neuroscience advocates and Backyard Brains ambassadors. The fellows dropped in on University of Michigan’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) Symposium during their final week of the fellowship, and each scientist gave a quick poster presentation about the work they’d been doing this summer! The fellows synthesized their data into the time-honored poster format and gave lightning-round pitches of their work to attendees. BYB is in the business of creating citizen scientists, and this real-world application is always a highlight of our fellowship. Check out their posters below!
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Call for Undergraduates in Biology or Engineering Fields:
Are you a neuroscience nerd? Do you want to learn how the brains of animals like squids or dragonflies work? Is your background in Electrical, Mechanical or Computer Engineering? Want to develop your own innovative experiments and publish your results? Learn to communicate those stunning results with the public? Maybe even all of the above? Then you’re in luck!
2017 Fellows from left to right: Top: Greg Gage (Not a fellow), Zach, Jaimie, Spencer, Nathan, Ilya. Bottom: Joud, Christy, Haley.
The Backyard Brains Summer Research Fellowship is an intensive 10 week program for undergraduates to participate in hands-on neuroscience research and experiment design with award winning neuroscientists. This is the 5th year of running our prestigious (and paid) summer program and this year it will run from May 21, 2018 to Aug 3, 2018 in Downtown Ann Arbor, MI. All applications must be received by noon eastern time (12:00 PM, EST) on March 22, 2018 to be eligible. We will be notifying applicants of their status by March 29, 2018.
Apply to the Summer Fellowship Today!
This is our 5th iteration of the program, and it just gets better every year. Like a fine wine! Our summer fellowship program is run much like a graduate school laboratory. All participants will be working on their own independent research projects for the whole summer. We will have daily journal clubs to go over key papers and expand knowledge in the area, and each participant will be trained how to develop their own experiments and to build their own devices to perform those experiments. You, future BYB scientist, will be collecting data, analyzing it, and presenting your results.
The end result of your summer fellowship will be a publishable experiment and video for our website, as well as a poster to be delivered at Undergraduate Research Poster Session of the Society for Neuroscience. In 2017, all of our participants presented their research at a Undergraduate Research conference and some were selected to be posters at the Society for Neuroscience Conference. We also brought home the hardware to show for the hard work: all of our research fellows will be featured in a new TED show called “DIY Neuroscience,” which will begin airing on March 14. We will work with each student to prepare a 10 minute TED-style talk for a public event in Ann Arbor, with the possibility of presenting at our annual TEDx event. We have also worked with students to continue refining their experiment writeups into manuscripts in order to publish first-authored papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Apply to the Summer Fellowship Today!
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Hey everyone! My summer of research in Ann Arbor has come to an end and it’s been an awesome experience. It’s been a busy 10 weeks of making daily improvements to my rig, resoldering the flyPAD, collecting data, and presenting what I found to others. The original goal of this project was to see if altering taste perception was possible by activating taste neurons with light – a new technique called optogenetics. To test this I stimulated channelrhodopsin in the neurons of fruit flies’ which give them a sweet taste response.
If you missed it, my first post: Optogenetics with the flyPAD, and my second post: The Taste Preferences of Fruit Flies
The FlyPAD setup in its full glory
Naturally, fruit flies prefer eating sugary as opposed to unsweet foods, similar to humans. This was the case when I offered them banana, a sweet fruit, and avocado, broccoli, and brussels sprouts, the unsweet alternatives. The flies always preferred banana over anything else. However, when Arduinos were programmed to pulse red light at the flies the same instant they sipped the unsweet foods, their gr5a neurons were activated, tricking them into thinking that what they were eating was sweet. The data is shown below, as bar graphs of the average number of sips and of sip % to see how food choice preference changed.
As we see here, the flies naturally prefer banana over avocado
But this preference switched when stimulation of channelrhodopsin activated their sweet tasting (gr5a) neuron
Flies, naturally, REALLY prefer banana over broccoli
The star preference we saw earlier disappeared, and the flies ate some of both foods: more of the newly sweet tasting broccoli and less of the banana.
Again, we see that banana wins the prize naturally.
And again, with stimulation, we see the sweet and the non-sweet options begin to level out
So, changing the subjective perception of taste is possible, as we could make a fly’s least preferred food become their absolute favorite! These findings show that subjective perception is alterable, but also that optogenetics is a neuroscience technique which can be done with little, affordable equipment.
If I end up continuing work on this project, I am interested to see how long the altered preference of the flies can persist. Anecdotally, I’ve seen that when the LED lights stop working there are some flies which continue to visit the unsweet food which they were tricked into tasting sweet. This wasn’t within the scope of my summer research, but I suspect that doing experiments on this would be interesting as it could reveal how powerful optogenetics is by creating a change in food choice preference that persists once stimulation trials have stopped.
After finding these results I compiled them into a poster which I recently presented at an UROP (undergraduate research opportunity program) symposium at the University of Michigan. It was fun explaining my summer’s work to the public and other researchers. Got a ribbon for it too!
Call me “Blue Ribbon”
A close up of my poster!
Aside from collecting data in the lab, I also had the chance to showcase my project with TED for their upcoming series of episodes focussed on the Backyard Brains’ research fellows’ projects. I was able to conduct experiments for them and give step by step walkthroughs of how they are carried out. Stay tuned on their posts coming around this fall to catch our episodes!
Getting filmed
Huge thanks to Greg for mentoring me this summer and introducing me to the world of Neuroscience research in the coolest way possible with BYB.
Thank you so much to Backyard Brains for giving me this amazing opportunity and to all the research fellows who made it a really fun summer!
The Backyard Brains 2018 Summer Research Fellowship is coming to a close, but not before we get some real-world scientific experience in! Our research fellows are nearing the end of their residency at the Backyard Brains lab, and they are about to begin their tenure as neuroscience advocates and Backyard Brains ambassadors. The fellows dropped in on University of Michigan’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) Symposium during their final week of the fellowship, and each scientist gave a quick poster presentation about the work they’d been doing this summer! The fellows synthesized their data into the time-honored poster format and gave lightning-round pitches of their work to attendees. BYB is in the business of creating citizen scientists, and this real-world application is always a highlight of our fellowship. Check out their posters below!
