Rawan Farhat
Pronouns: She/her
Research Mentor(s): Longhua Guo
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Molecular and Integrative Physiology; Geriatrics Center / Medicine
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 2 (10:00am – 10:50am)
Authors:
Abstract
On Earth, every organism has chromosomes, which are “a threadlike structure of nucleic acids and protein found in the nucleus of most living cells, carrying genetic information in the form of genes†(Oxford Languages). Whilst all organisms have chromosomes, different species have different numbers of chromosomes, all of which can be different shapes and sizes. These differing numbers, shapes and sizes of chromosomes are called karyotypes. Planarians have recently gained attention within the scientific community as a model for stem cells, regeneration and aging research. Within planarians, the most commonly used species for research are Schmidtea mediterranea. However, many other planarian species with intriguing biology are also used in laboratory research. Morphologically, they can be very similar. How to tell these species apart becomes an important question for experimental planning and colony maintenance. As such, we took advantage of the fact that different species have different karyotypes, and adapted an inexpensive, straightforward approach to isolate the chromosomes from different planarians for species identification. My project aims to use the karyotype information in order to determine the species of planarians. The aforementioned species – Schmidtea mediterranea – has 2 copies of 4 chromosomes, while the other planarian species in the lab, Schmidtea polychroa, have chromosomes that are of very different shapes, because these chromosomes differ by where the centromere is located. Through my research, we have determined the species identity of two populations that the Guo lab collected from the wild that will be used in future research.
