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| Eshan Safaya |
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| Rhea Richardson |
Two Murrah High School Base Pair students represented Mississippi July 8-12 in the ACT-SO competition in New York City.
ACT-SO – the Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics – is a major youth initiative of the NAACP. ACT-SO is a yearlong enrichment program designed to recruit, stimulate, improve and encourage high academic and cultural achievement among African American high school students. Gold medalists at the state level qualify for the national finals held each summer.
Eshan Safaya, a 2009 graduate of Murrah, won a silver medal along with $1500 from the ACT-SO office of NAACP and a laptop computer from State Farm Insurance Company. He competed in the Medicine and Health Sciences Division. Safaya will be attending the University of Mississippi this fall and will be enrolled in the pre-medicine honors program.
Rhea Richardson, an incoming senior at Murrah, competed in the biology/microbiology division. Safaya also was one of Mississippi’s representatives at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in May in Reno, Nevada. Richardson was selected as an alternate and attended the fair.
Their instructor at Murrah is Jeffery Stokes. “Eshan’s and Rhea’s success shows what is possible when public schools like JPS, public universities like the University of Mississippi Medical Center and private institutions like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute come together to create opportunities for students,” Stokes said.
The Base Pair program, funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, pairs Murrah students with research mentors at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC). His research mentor at UMMC was Dr. Parminder Vig, whose work for the last several years has focused on understanding why and how nerve cells die in human brain diseases, thus causing a variety of disabilities in the patients suffering from them. Safaya's winning project at ACT-SO was "The Correlation between Cytoplasmic Vacuoles and Ataxin -1 Nuclear Inclusions in Purkinje Cells in Spino-cerebellar Ataxia Type 1 (SCA1)."
A more detailed look at the research of Dr. Vig and Safaya::
The main emphasis has been on dominantly inherited diseases of the cerebellum. One such disorder is known as spinocerebellar ataxia-1 (SCA1). In SCA1, nerve cells called Purkinje neurons located in the cerebellum slowly die. However, it's not known why Purkinje cells die and what treatment strategies should be used to save them. Transgenic mice made by introducing human SCA1 gene in Purkinje cells, show symptoms and pathology similar to the human disease. Therefore, SCA1 transgenic mouse is a good model to study the development of human SCA1.
Currently, Dr. Vig and co-workers have been using mice, which in addition to SCA1 disease contain green fluorescent protein in Purkinje cells. The presence of green fluorescent protein makes cells look green under the microscope. This helps identify and study SCA1 Purkinje cells during development and before the onset of the disease. Purkinje cells are also grown in culture to study the effects of different drugs on their growth. Understanding the mechanisms involved in Purkinje cell death will help develop treatments for SCA1 patients.