Author: Breanna Williams | Major: Biology
Hello! My name is Breanna Williams. I am a senior, biology major in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. I began working with Dr. Washington in the Exercise Science Muscle Biology Lab in the fall of 2020. It feels like it was just yesterday that I was meeting with Dr. Washington about joining the lab, and now I’m graduating on May 13th, and I just passed my honors thesis defense. It’s crazy to me how fast the time has gone. This past semester was all about wrapping up the animal work needed for my thesis and running various analyses for the results while putting together the final paper and presentation. I also helped the other PhD students in the lab with some of their work, but I mainly got to focus on mine. After graduation I will be moving back home for the summer to work. Then in July I will moving back to Northwest Arkansas to begin medical school at the UAMS Northwest campus.
My thesis research looked at how a leucine supplementation affected mitochondrial markers in pre-cachectic female mice. Cancer cachexia is the muscle atrophy over time due to the progression of cancer. This syndrome is responsible for up to 40% of all cancer related deaths and is virtually irreversible. Leucine had been shown to stimulate skeletal muscle synthesis in healthy individuals but appeared to worsen this atrophy in male, cancer mice. So, we did this study to see if this trend continued in females and if there were any early indications of this in the quality of the mitochondria. We ultimately found that there were no significant differences between female mice predisposed to cancer and healthy control mice. This is interesting because this result showed that the females weren’t negatively affected by the leucine treatment as the male mice were, which begs the question of “what is protecting the females?” This could be of great interest for future research.
At the end of my sophomore year, I was still on the path to go to physical therapy school, so I knew I wanted to be in a lab that dealt with more physiology than biology. I began googling the exercise science labs on campus and Dr. Washington’s came up. After reading about him and his lab, I knew that I wanted to be a part of it and work with him. So, I sent him an email, met with him on zoom, and started in the lab in August of 2020. I knew I wanted my thesis to be related to cancer research while staying in the realm of muscle biology. Our lab had recently produced the preliminary data about leucine exacerbating muscle atrophy in males, so Dr. Washington and I decided to build off that and look at females. Since we didn’t have data on mitochondrial markers, we then agreed to put those two ideas together and that’s how we came up with my thesis.
We did have some challenges though. Originally, my thesis was supposed to contain data on male and female mice from the 13-week and 20-week timepoint. But we ran out of time for the 20-week data, and we didn’t have enough male mice to fill each of the groups. It was frustrating to know we couldn’t have all that data, but we made it work by reworking the title and shifting the objectives of the study. And despite those challenges, we still came out with a great project that yielded interesting results. One thing this project has taught me is how to be patient and flexible when things don’t work out the way you originally plan for them to. And especially going into the medical field, this is a good skill to have.
Dr. Washington was incredibly helpful throughout the research process. He always made himself available to meet whenever I needed to and provided feedback on the research as well as my writing. Eleanor Schrems, a PhD student in the lab, went above and beyond as well. She helped me anytime I needed it, and I’m so thankful for how much time she dedicated to helping me, because without it my thesis would not have turned out as well as it did.
Though my own research was only presented at my honors thesis defense, I helped enough in the lab with Eleanor’s project that I was listed as a co-author on her abstract. This abstract was presented at the American College of Sports Medicine Conference that was held at the U of A this spring. I didn’t personally present the abstract, but I was able to attend the conference as a co-author and hear her present it which was super cool! With my time in the muscle biology lab ending, I look back on my time there with gratitude. As I move on to medical school, I’m thankful for what I learned in the lab and the people I became friends with, and I hope that my research in the lab lays a foundation for future students to build off of and learn from.