| Faculty Advisor |
Andrea Cupp
|
|---|---|
| Contact Email | acupp2@unl.edu |
| Website | |
| Advisor College: |
Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources
|
| Potential Student Tasks |
Responsibilities include general lab maintenance and assisting graduate students and post-docs with experiments and analysis. Student researchers will be expected to keep an organized and detailed lab notebook, understand that tasks such as labeling tubes and washing dishes are just as important as conducting experiments and collecting data. |
| Student Qualifications |
We are looking for student researchers who are detail-oriented and excited to learn new skills. Student researchers must be willing to work as a team and troubleshoot alongside others to help solve problems. |
| Training, Mentoring, and Workplace Community |
Our lab is very teamwork-oriented, as many projects need multiple sets of hands. Incoming student researchers will be working alongside a graduate student or a postdoctoral researcher to complete a project, with flexibility to answer new questions based on the student's specific interests. We are passionate about working with students to figure out their future goals and help them obtain the skills to reach those goals. We are flexible to accommodate for student class schedules. Student researchers will also be contributing to a project that aims to improve both human and agricultural health. |
| Available Positions |
1
|
About 15% of cattle in our herd have higher than normal levels of androstenedione (a hormone used to make testosterone). These cattle (High A4 cows), also have irregular reproductive cycles because of ovarian abnormalities such as decreased progression of ovarian follicles. This is similar to what is seen in women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS; now renamed polymetabolic ovary syndrome or PMOS). Other ovarian abnormalities include excess inflammation and collagen buildup, which is also similar to what is seen in PMOS but also the ovaries of aging women. We have been able to reverse some of these effects in tissue culture by treating ovarian cortex with the vascular endothelial growth factor A 165 (VEGFA 165), a growth factor involved in the generation of new blood vessels. However, exactly how the inflammation and collagen buildup remains unknown. Cells within the follicle responsible for nurturing the egg, granulosa cells, have inappropriate regulation that causes the formation of a persistent follicle. For this project we will conduct granulosa cell and ovarian cortex culture and utilize different reagents to see if we can replicate the system in our High A4 cows and also rescue the phenotype- reducing inflammation, allowing for granulosa cell proliferation and follicle development, etc. We would then analyze our cultures to determine differences in genes, protein, hormones, cytokines to better understand the pathways involved in excess androgen rescue.