Post-staining imaging of muscle tissue slides at the ENRC

Author: Colton Gattis | Major: Biomedical Engineering | Semester: Spring 2023

Colton Gattis is an Honors College Fellow in the College of Engineering studying biomedical engineering with a minor in math. He has been collaborating with Dr. Wolchok from the biomedical engineering department throughout the spring semester. Colton plans on continuing this research in the fall for the preparation of his honors thesis and anticipates going into the industry after graduating.

Upon stepping on campus in 2020, I made it my immediate goal to get involved in undergraduate research. I reached out to Dr. Wolchok as his research in regenerative medicine piqued my interest immediately. His research revolves around muscle injuries in rats and efforts to improve the healing of these injuries. Typically, these experiments look at the presence of proliferate cells with the addition of various therapeutics; however, my research is branching out into a new field of investigations involving spatial transcriptomics.

This field of study focuses on the expression of genes within a tissue while mapping where this expression occurs. In my research, I intend to use this information to analyze the presence of genes above, below, and within a wound site. Muscle injuries can be very overwhelming for our body’s natural recovery processes, and an individual’s strength can suffer from this inability to recover. These results would allow for new therapeutic techniques to be created to improve healing. It also would give an insight into inflammatory and regenerative processes throughout the healing process.

This past summer I honed my skills at many different histology processes. Using previously collected tissues, I sliced, mounted, stained, and imaged tissue slides to ensure that I had enough experience for my current research. This came with some difficulties as I was unfamiliar with the equipment, but with the help of graduate students I became pretty proficient. This really taught me how much I enjoy learning about muscular anatomy and physiology through histology.

During this semester, I had to tackle a pretty major challenge involving the analysis of this data. Spatial transcriptomics results in a large dataset which must be analyzed and graphed for any conclusions to be drawn. Other studies use the statistical computing programming language R to analyze this large dataset; however, I had never worked with this language before in my undergraduate career. I ended up meeting with Dr. Wolchok about this concern, and he pointed me towards good academic journals that sourced the R code used. This semester I also enrolled in a biostatistics course that teaches you the basics of R which greatly helped overcome this obstacle.

Overall, Dr. Wolchok has been a great reference for me to go to in times of confusion or trouble. He has sought out resources for me to better myself as an undergraduate researcher, and he attempts to explain our objectives in a simple and direct manner. I’ve learned a lot throughout my research experience, and I believe that it has made me into a better engineer because of it.

I anticipate receiving the spatial transcriptomic data this coming fall, and I will begin to map and analyze genetic expressions of both healthy and injured muscle tissue. The methods of this analysis are still currently unknown; however, it is known that many comparisons will be made based on location and the resulting healing response. These results will be compiled into my honors thesis, and I plan on compiling this into a poster to present at the BMES conference in October.