Collaborations

Muscle damage in anole lizards

This is a serendipitous collaboration, but one I really enjoy being a part of. I went to a lecture by Dr. Michele Johnson where she was studying relationships between skeletal muscle morphology and function/frequency of use. One of the challenges in behavioral ecology is an accurate quantification of relatively rare or cryptic behaviors such as copulation. Her reasoning was that behaviors which activate skeletal muscles should lead to adaption such as hypertrophy and fiber type switching. In particular, Michele was interested in relating observed copulation rates to adaptations in the retractor penis magnus. During her presentation I noticed large amounts of muscle damage (primarily invaded muscle fibers) and asked if she had quantified it. This lead to a collaboration between her, myself, and Dr. Ariel Kahrl (my amazing wife). We found that RPM damage was significantly correlated to observed copulation rate. This work was presented at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting in 2018 and was accepted for publication in 2021

Immune modulation and muscle derived EcSOD

I have had the fortunate opportunity to work with Dr. Zhen Yan, and his former post-doc Dr. Jarrod Call, on an enhanced EcSOD (extracellular superoxide dismutase) mice model. The Zhen group has shown that muscle derived EcSOD plays an important antioxidative role, working systemically to reduce cardiac cachexia and complications associated with chronic heart failure as well as improve survival during sepsis. I have contributed to some of these works by looking at the vasculature and monocyte/macrophage dynamics. Below is a video of monocytes in a venule from a dorsal skin fold window chamber experiment. The bright cells in the blood vessel are GFP positive, and the GFP production is linked to Cx3CR1 (found mainly in monocytes). From this video, I was able to quantify the number of rolling, adhered, and flowing monocytes from mice with and without enhanced EcSOD.