Final Project
Maternal genotypic effect on offspring activity level of 3xTg-AD mice
Annotated Bibliography
I chose 10 articles from the beginning of my research to include in my annotated bibliography. Some of these articles did not make their way to my final project, but they were definitive stepping stones in my progress so I thought to include them was of use.
Edit by an Engineer
As I was writing up my final version of my project, I was struggling with making sure I had included sufficient information that leads up to my hypothesis. I happened to be studying with a friend who is studying engineering so I asked for a quick read though. I quickly realized that the language of a science student and the language of an engineering student are worlds apart so not much was achieved in terms of content. My friend ended up making some grammar corrections instead which was still very helpful. 🙂
Annotated Bibliography
This is a link to running resources that I used along the way for my final project:
Ongoing Annotated Bibliography
I will list a final copy of this at a later time.
First Draft
Material that needs to be added (critique from peer):
- Need to insert a lot of the sources for this material – how do you know what you wrote?
- Give proper rational about why the experiment chosen is the best way to answer this question (specifically why wheel-activity?).
- Edit for grammar and organization
Building a hypothesis
The specific null and alternate hypotheses:
Ho: The mean running activity from subjective day and the subjective night is the same for all groups. (ie. variance is equal to zero)
HA: The mean running activity from subjective day and the subjective night is different for at least one group from the others. (ie. variance is not equal to zero)
Complete change of topic
As I began to look into more and more papers, my interests changed. I read this very  interesting paper which made me interested in the effect maternal genotype plays in offspring phenotype.
As I found myself lost in a sea of scientific papers, I started learning about various model mice that are used to study various diseases in humans. Specifically, I got interested in triple transgenic mice (3xTg-AD) that are a model for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), mimicking the human AD, such that these mice exhibit age-related cognitive decline and also have been shown to display disturbances in circadian sleep-wake patterns that are known to be early identifiers of AD in humans!
I wonder if I could sort of meld these two concepts – maternal genotype and 3xTg-AD circadian sleep-wake patterns.
Time to start learning about mice:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK5231/
Developing a question
I am currently also taking a course on Developmental Biology where we have been spent a considerable amount of time focusing on the sexual developmental of different organisms (including mammals). This sphere on that course does not cover mutations that may arise, but we did briefly touch of the sexual variation that can arise due to differential endocrine environment the embryo may be in. As I studied this topic, I began to wonder: at what point of development do mutations arise or is the regularly observed developmental process altered in cases of sexual ambiguity? Sexual ambiguity here is being used to denote a sexual phenotype that is not able to be distinguished as distinctly male or female. Mammals are known to be sexually dimorphic organisms, but there are cases where sex is assigned at birth arbitrarily as the common male or female phenotype is not seen.