A group of AP Biology and AP Anatomy and Physiology students from Carlisle School, located in Axton, VA, visited UVA this spring to learn about the research occurring in multiple labs within the School of Medicine. The visit was also a homecoming for the students’ teacher, a former UVA employee.

Hosted by the Department of Cell Biology, the students engaged in developmental biology research being carried out in the Hirschi, Wythe and Kulkarni labs. 

Members of the Hirschi lab, which is highly interested in the role of cell cycle regulation in endothelial cell differentiation, specification, and function, taught the students about animal husbandry, flow cytometry, bioinformatic data analysis, and animal anatomy. They were also able to watch an experimental procedure used to assess endothelial cell dysregulation.

The Wythe lab, who uses transgenic mouse and zebrafish models to study vascular malformations, provided the students a unique opportunity to see an optically cleared mouse embryo and to observe it close-up using a 3-dimensional light sheet microscope, as well as live imaging of fluorescently injected zebrafish embryos.

Rounding out their visit to the department, the students observed frog embryos in various stages of development in the Kulkarni lab, whose research interests include classifying clinical gene variants and proteins of interest that affect multiciliated cells.

A special thanks to Jordon Aragon, Ola Cwiek, Uma Devi Paila, Jay Wolfe, Liz Nelson, Valentin Delobel, Gabrielle Largoza, Angelo Arrigo, and Dana Urbatsch for sharing their expertise!

Additionally, the students visited the Sheynkman lab in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics to learn about mass spectrometry from Research Senior Scientist Erin Jeffery and the Desai lab in the Department of Pharmacology, where they observed patch clamping of a calcium channel and calcium imaging experiments under the guidance of graduate student John Duncan.