This is a past event.

Adriana San Miguel 
NC State University
Associate Professor
Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
 

Short bio: AdrianaSan Miguel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical &Biomolecular Engineering at NC State University. She is also part of the university’s Synthetic and Systems Biology Cluster. Her work combines engineering and biology and focuses on developing tools to perform high-throughput automated experiments with the model organism C. elegans. These tools are used to better understand aging, stress, and neurodegeneration.

She received a BS in Chemical Engineering at the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico and obtained a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Georgia Tech, where she worked with Sven Behrens. She trained as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Hang Lu at Georgia Tech and with Marc Vidal at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She has received several awards, which include the NIA K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, DOD New Investigator Award, the AMED Interstellar Initiative on Healthy Longevity, and a Goodnight Early Career Innovator.

High-content analysis of neurodegeneration and stress in C. elegans

Abstract: C. elegans has served as a crucial model organism to understand a plethora of fundamental biological phenomena. In particular, these nematodes are excellent model systems to study aging and neurodegeneration. Being transparent and amenable to easy genetic manipulation, C. elegans allows analysis of many biological processes by in vivo microscopy. In our work, we incorporate microfluidics and machine learning to enable rapid quantitative analysis and sorting of individual C. elegans in high-throughput. These systems allow the analysis of complex and subtle phenotypes at the cellular and subcellular level from fluorescent images, and the genetic pathways that modulate them. While C. elegans is commonly used, most analyses focus on rough readouts, such as viability. Combining high-resolution microscopy with computer vision presents an opportunity to look deeper into the effects of environmental and genetic perturbations in C. elegans. In this talk, I will present work on high-content pipelines for analysis of aging, stress, and neurodegeneration induced by environmental exposures, which have revealed robust evidence of the link between structure and function in neurons and early biomarkers for aging.