Kourtnie received a $1,000 grant from the American Microscopical Society for her research project titled “Testing leptin regulation of mucus secretion in X. tropicalis embryonic mucociliary epidermis: A model for respiratory epithelium”
She will be testing the hypothesis that leptin signaling promotes mucus secretion/production in mucociliary epithelia, such as the lining of mammalian respiratory tract, by using the Xenopus epidermis as a model for mucociliary epithelia. To do this, she will be upregulating and downregulating leptin in Xenopus and examining changes in mucus secretion/production and changes in numbers of mucus secreting cells. She will also determine expression patterns of leptin and leptin receptor mRNA to determine cell-specific leptin signaling.
Congratulations, Kourtnie!