Students see their way clear to awards

For the third year a graduate student from Kathleen Hill’s laboratory in the Biology Department has won an award for outstanding research at Annual Ophthalmology Research Day.

Alex LaliberteAlex Laliberte’s prize winning presentation featured a mouse model of retinal degeneration. The talk was given to a group of clinical ophthalmologists. “I guess they liked it.” he says.  This particular model used an animal called the harlequin mouse. “This mouse model has a mutation which causes it to age very quickly,” says Laliberte. “It is of interest because most of the retinal degeneration we see is age related so using this model is a good way of determining what kind of risk factors can potentially lead to a retinal degenerative disease from just normal aging at an accelerated rate.”

 

 

 

Daniel PaluzziThis year a new category for undergraduate research was introduced and again a student from Hill’s group picked up the prize. Daniel Paluzzi is a second year student working on human oculodentodigital dysplasia. “We just call it ODDD because it is quite a mouthful,” he says. The disease is caused by a mutation in a gene which codes for a protein which allows cells to communicate with each other.  The disease is known mostly for affecting the heart, but it also damages tissues within the eye. “We noticed that the irises had split,” he says.  Another structure known as the ciliary body is found within the eye and surrounds the iris.  The ciliary body functions in aqueous humor production keeping the eye filled with fluid.  In ODDD, Paluzzi says that the “ciliary bodies had developed huge vesicles and normal function was impaired.  We were trying to characterize that so we can use it in future intervention studies for pharmaceutical and surgical purposes.”  Hill says that this study “was a fourth year project that needed finishing off with many more ages, assay and the equipment that we have in the Experimental Eye Research Facility.”

 
Daniel and Alex are co-authors on a paper based on this research and currently under review for the journal “Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science” and was a team effort between the laboratories of Drs. Hill, Hutnik, Laird and Kidder.

 

Mouse eye cross section showing ODDD like symptom

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