As an English major, I can guarantee that I wont be called upon to inject a drug into a mouse brain. But for neuroscience honors candidate Alex Gogliettino 17 of Branford, Conn., thats a basic skill.

Already accepted into doctoral programs in neuroscience for next year, Gogliettino has spent hundreds of hours in a Bates lab using a mouse model to analyze and interpret a possible treatment for an exceptionally rare autism-spectrum disorder in humans.

In preparation for his honors thesis research, he spent the past two summers working at Yale University in the lab of Dr. Marc Potenza, receiving support from a Bates Summer Research Fellowship and the Kelsey Prize for Neuroscience Research, named for Professor Emeritus of Psychology John Kelsey.

This year, hes brought all his Bates training to bear on his thesis, DNA Methylomics: Targeting TET1 as a Treatment for Intellectual Disability, and as he explained it to me, this was my immediate thought: This is important, and I need to know more.

My adviser and I are basically knocking down a protein that is, blocking it from being made in the brain to try to enhance learning and memory in mice that have been genetically modified to have a certain intellectual disability.

The protein is the one in my thesis title: TET1, or Ten-eleven translocation methylcytosine dioxygenase 1.

We are also trying to better understand the molecular mechanisms that underpin learning and memory.

Thats one of the biggest challenges in science: Communicating to individuals who are not necessarily involved in science what exactly you are doing.

My actual thesis delves deeply into the molecular biology, but in the first few pages I discuss what this topic means to me personally and how it is addressing a societal issue and a pressing biomedical issue, intellectual disability. I explain why Im intrigued by it.

OK, this gets pretty philosophical. Humans have the capacity to recall just crazy amounts of detail from earlier parts of our lives. And that capacity really is what makes us who we are. We are what we can remember about our past. Thats just crazy, and its just a unique, really interesting puzzle.

And also, there are diseases of the brain, like Alzheimers and many others, where individuals cant do that. And in rare disorders like the one I am studying, Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome, they have impaired language and memory function.

Individuals with this disease are missing a functional copy of a single gene known as Transcription Factor 4.

Pitt Hopkins is an extremely rare disease. There are only about 500 people in the world that we know of. Individuals with Pitt Hopkins Syndrome often do not develop language spoken or sign.

My project is based on Pitt Hopkins research being done at Bates by my thesis adviser, Andrew Kennedy. We think one of the reasons is a disruption in their capacity for verbal memory.

Hes new, and I didnt really meet him until this year.

Last year, I was taking a neuroscience class, and my professor, Nancy Koven, was saying how Bates was hiring a new professor and we should go to the research talk that each candidate gives. I went and I thought that he was asking really interesting questions about learning and memory.

So I just emailed him, a cold email saying, I would love to work with you. He emailed me back and said, That would be cool. Here are the projects that you can work on.

Alex Gogliettinos thesis adviser is Assistant Professor of Chemistry Andrew Kennedy, shown teaching an organic chemistry lab on Feb. 9, 2017, in Dana Chemistry Hall. (Josh Kuckens/Bates College)

I really like working with him. Hes always available through email, phone, etc. Hes only 33 and has just finished his post-doc so he knows whats like to be an undergrad.

More important, he also went to a small college, Providence College, so he knows what the relationship between a small-college professor and a student is. He really cares and understands that this whole thing is a learning experience.

The most important part was to make sure I familiarized myself with the literature, so I started reading last May. Thats probably one of the hardest parts of a project like this: wrapping your head around what is actually happening in the field, where the barriers to new knowledge are, and what we know vs. what we dont know. That is a really important part of science.

Last semester, almost every morning from around 9 to 12, I would write. I would have the most energy in the morning, and writing is very taxing, thats the best time for me.

The spot where I wrote really didnt matter. I would just go somewhere I was comfortable and could work for three hours. It would depend. I would mix it up. First floor of the library sometimes. Then the third floor, then the second floor. And sometimes in my room at my desk.

When you start familiarizing yourself with the field, the first pieces of literature you are going to read are pretty intense. Honestly, reading a scientific paper in an unfamiliar field takes about five hours to go through. Youve got to just take your time and start as early as you possibly can.

I started out with reading review articles, which are not necessarily studies per se, but are reviewing the literature. They give you a scope of the field. They give you perspective, help you familiarize yourself with the jargon and, again, tell you whats known and whats not known about the field.

And once I started to get a feel for that, I started delving deep into the hard-core research papers. It was daunting, a little bit, but I would just take my time.

The most interesting part are the questions we are asking about our ability to recall thingsfrom the past, and how that fits into the bigger picture of understanding how the brain gives rise to consciousness. That is the coolest part.

I think the most difficult part is that this work is technically difficult and very time-consuming. Thats not negative, just challenging.

Working with animals requires a good amount of dexterity and injecting drugs into a mouse brain is pretty hard. In the grand scheme of cognitive neurobiology research, its pretty simple surgery, but at the undergraduate level it is probably one of the most challenging things that I would do.

Neuroscience major Alex Gogliettino 17 of Branford, Conn., poses in a Carnegie Science Hall laboratory on Feb. 28, 2017. The red light helps create a calm environment for the labs work with mice. Since mice cannot see red light, they behave as they would in their preferred, darkened environment. (Josh Kuckens/Bates College)

Also, another component of my thesis involves working with big data and doing computer-science work, so I had to teach myself a lot of computer science stuff, too. That was tough and challenging, but you grow and learn a lot from it.

Especially with lab theses, there is only a certain amount of control when you run the experiments. And there is a lot of stuff you cant control. That is just going to happen.

One of the most important parts of doing thesis, and being involved with science at all, is just understanding that nothing is ever going to be perfect. You are going to mess up and you are going to fail. But dont be discouraged or shy away from that. Just learn from your mistakes and move on. Be a little too optimistic at times because you need that positive energy to keep going, because there will be a lot of roadblocks to be found, but you can overcome them.

I hope to continue doing neuroscience research for the next five years, at least.

Ive been accepted to a couple neuroscience Ph.D. programs, at Washington University and Vanderbilt, and am heading to Stanford for interviews this week.

I have the potential opportunity to work with a professor who advised Professor Kennedy, doing the same sort of work at a research university that were doing here at Bates.

Interviews are just a great time to talk science with professors and be immersed in an environment where everyone is as passionate about studying neuroscience as you are.

Original post:
Q&A: Neuroscience major Alex Gogliettino '17 explores 'what makes us who we are' - Bates News