A Unlikely Star of Science
Jonathan Freedman Looks to Microscopic Roundworms to Document
the Effects of Toxic Chemicals p.6
Brady’s specialty is the design
and use of algorithms, mathematical rules that translate the
shapes and features of objects into computer code, so they
can be reconstructed as virtual images.
Noting that fluorescent genes already
are being used to illuminate nematode nervous systems, she
envisions capturing the essential elements of those ghostly
images as algorithms to be computer processed.
“You have two worms and one of them
you have exposed and one of them you haven’t and the goal
is to ask: ‘What has changed in their neurons?’” she says.
“We want to know at any point in time in the worm’s development
what is changing, in three dimensions.”
If she and her colleagues can capture
enough such changes in the form of algorithms, much eye-straining
microscopic examination of chemically exposed worms may become
a thing of the past, she says.
“You will put your worms into the
robot, hit ‘go,’ have a cup of coffee and come back to get
a beautiful picture you can bring up on the Web and a report
that says ‘this is what happened to these worms.’”
She notes that Sandra McBride, a
visiting assistant professor of statistics at Duke whose research
addresses environmental themes, is already developing modeling
techniques to automatically measure nematodes’ lengths as
well as
classify them by age based on those lengths.
“So some of the automation has started,”
Brady says.
In addition to studying living worms,
Freedman’s lab also is equipped to evaluate their genes more
directly. Whole flasks of worms can be grown and dosed with
chemicals before having the messenger RNA extracted from their
cells.
Messenger RNA molecules, which carry
instructions from genes on how to build proteins, can then
be assembled in large numbers on microchip-like microarrays
to compare with the genomes of nematodes that have not been
exposed to chemicals.
“We will look for changes in the
expression of every gene in the animal caused by a given chemical,”
says Freedman. “We need to come up with microarray fingerprints
for each of the toxins.”
Monte Basgall is a senior writer
with Duke’s Office of News and Communications and specializes
in science coverage.
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