Today I did not go into the lab because UGA was closed for MLK Day. But I did read a couple of articles to get some information for the paper requirement, start a log for the time I spend shadowing physicians, and make the rough draft for my presentation. The papers I read were "Signaling and Function of Insulin-Like Peptides in Insects" and the author is Dr. Mark Brown (whose lab I am working in) and one of his undergraduate students, Qi Wu. Dr. Brown gave me this article because it is a review article of what is known of insulin like peptides in several different species of insects. It was helpful because it improved my understanding of insulin like peptides, but I will not be able to use much of the information for my paper because I really want my paper to focus on what is known about ILPs in mosquitos and much of the information in this paper was about ILPs in Drosophila melanogaster. I also read "An insulin-like peptide regulates egg maturation and metabolism in the mosquito Aedes aegypti." As the title says, the paper was about what the known effects of ILPs are on reproductive and metabolic function in the A. aegypti mosquito. The paper had a nice description of the structure of an ILP, some basic information about the life cycle of the mosquito, and some background information on human ILPs - all points that I will include in my paper. The study showed that ILP3 in the mosquito was most similar to human insulin and was also found to be present in the mosquito brain. It also showed that ILP3 stimulates egg maturation in mosquitos. They found this by decapitating mosquitos and then injecting them with synthetic ILP3. The ovaries of the decapitated mosquitos then began to secret ecdysteroid hormones which caused that fat body to secrete yolk proteins (which were derived from the blood meal) in order to form the eggs. It also identified the receptor for ILP3 (mosquito insulin receptor - MIR) and showed that ILP3 without the receptor does not work. They did this by injecting double stranded RNA of the gene that controls the MIR so that the RNA would be degraded and the gene would not be expressed (therefore causing no insulin receptor to be present). In the absence of MIR, with the injection of ILP3 no reaction occurred. These two paper will be very useful for when I begin to write my paper, and I am glad I had this day to read and take notes on them because I have not had much of an opportunity to read so far.
Over the weekend I bought a notebook that will serve as my log for all of the times that I shadow a physician. I recorded my time with Dr. Manning and wrote a few notes about what I thought of the visit in it. I also made a rough outline of my presentation.
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