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Analysis of human neural cells’ phenotype and behavior grown on Polycaprolactone nanosubstrate with different topographies

Ngu, Philip (2017) MOBK01 20162
Degree Projects in Molecular Biology
Popular Abstract
Brain diseases’ despair

“Please save my grandma!” A rather saddening expression to hear is it not? This is a sentence that not a lot of people say every day, maybe once or twice in one’s lifetime for most of us. Imagine this, your beloved grandma who has been by your side ever since you were born suddenly becomes senile. Her memory gets worse by the day and before you even know it, she does not remember you and might even turn into a completely different person. This disease could even deteriorate her health so much so she could be lying on a hospital bed waiting to pass away. Even though you beg the doctors to save your beloved grandma, they most likely will say that they cannot do anything about it due to lack of knowledge within this... (More)
Brain diseases’ despair

“Please save my grandma!” A rather saddening expression to hear is it not? This is a sentence that not a lot of people say every day, maybe once or twice in one’s lifetime for most of us. Imagine this, your beloved grandma who has been by your side ever since you were born suddenly becomes senile. Her memory gets worse by the day and before you even know it, she does not remember you and might even turn into a completely different person. This disease could even deteriorate her health so much so she could be lying on a hospital bed waiting to pass away. Even though you beg the doctors to save your beloved grandma, they most likely will say that they cannot do anything about it due to lack of knowledge within this field. This is why I want to declare war on dementia by telling you about this recent remarkable discovery, how to control the growth of nerve cells.

Dementia is a broad class of neurodegenerative diseases, which means that the nerve cells in your brain start to die out as you get older. Other diseases related to the death of nerve cells are stroke, parkinson’s disease etc. These diseases are more commonly found in elderly people. To be able to cure patients with these kind of diseases, we need to know how these cells grow and behave on different types of surfaces as they grow. Nerve cells, let alone cells in general, are very sensitive to their environment they are growing at. A conventional growth surface for cells is usually 2D. This is way different than the environment in the brain, and needless to say, the cells would definitely grow and behave differently. Therefore, I examined how the cells behaved on artificially made 2.5D surface.

Neural stem cells’ hope
Human Neural Progenitor Cells are the cells I have been using for this research. These cells are human cells that have the ability to mature and develop into nerve cells. I had two different groups of cells that had different maturity. One group spent 20 days in an incubator to be at a later stage in terms of maturity whereas the other group spent 0 days. Finally, I labelled them with different markers so that they could give off a color and signal their position when I analyzed them in a microscope.

What I found is that the cells showed a remarkable difference depending on whether they grew on flat or fibers. From what I can infer, the number of projections that extended out from the cell differed where the cells grown on flat have several whereas the ones on fiber most of the times only have 1 or 2. The number of projections is important since it connects nerve cells together but it does not necessarily mean that more projections are better because too many could lead to unwanted effects.

With these promising results, it will not be long until the neural progenitor cells’ hope crushes the brain diseases’ despair.

Supervisors: Ulrica Englund Johansson & Marina Castro Zalis
Degree Project, 15 credits in Molecular Biology 2016
Department of Biology, Lund University (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Ngu, Philip
supervisor
organization
course
MOBK01 20162
year
type
M2 - Bachelor Degree
subject
language
English
id
8902532
date added to LUP
2017-02-06 15:55:03
date last changed
2017-02-06 15:55:03
@misc{8902532,
  author       = {{Ngu, Philip}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Analysis of human neural cells’ phenotype and behavior grown on Polycaprolactone nanosubstrate with different topographies}},
  year         = {{2017}},
}