The Neuroscience Lab Capstone involves a hand-on portion where the seniors are able to work with C. elegans in a neuroscience lab on campus. The C. elegans will be used to model addiction like behavior and mechanisms in the lab in hopes of creating a model for human drug addiction. In the lab, we use specific techniques for plating the worms, washing the plates of various chemicals, and adding the desired chemicals and drugs to the plates. The C. elegans are kept on agar plates with a bacterial lawn of E. Coli to support growth. We use procedures such as chunking and age synchronization to grow specific strains of worms. In each of the three experiments ran in the class, the C. elegans were transfered to a 6 well-plate that has the control and drug on the plate in two seperate spots. The movement of the worms to each spot was then tracked over at least thirty minutes and images of the wells are collected. The data was then processed using SDSS to measure drug preference.

Three specific experiments were performed during the semester, being benzaldehyde and noanone preference, ehtanol preference in wild-type and a mutant strain, and ethanol preference in both wild-type and a mutant strain after the exposure to amphetamines. The first study established that C. elegans have an ethanol preference whereas the second study compared the preference levels of the wild-type and mu opiod knock-out C. elegans. The third study then attempted to establish the effects of naltraxone pretreatment on knockout and wildtype C. elegans. These experiments are pivotal to recent studies about the use of C. elegans in drug-related studies and the results will be used in an upcoming publication on the topic from IUPUI. 

The capstone class was divided into three sections and one group created a poster on a specific experiment. My group evaluated the third experiment and created the poster below, which was presented at IUPUI's capstone day.