Note: This article is over a year old and information contained in it may no longer be accurate. Please use the contact information in the lower-left corner to verify any information in this article.

St. Olaf senior presents regeneration research at conference

By Kari VanDerVeen
December 11, 2008

St. Olaf College student Rachel Kneeland '09 presented her research on the role that microglia may play in central nervous system regeneration at the LifeScience Alley 2008 Conference and Expo held in Minneapolis Dec. 10.

KneelandRachel09
Rachel Kneeland '09 stands beside a poster describing her research at the LifeScience Alley 2008 Conference and Expo.
This is the first year that undergraduates have been invited to present in the student research session of this conference, and Kneeland was one of just two students selected from a liberal arts college. LifeScience Alley is a trade organization serving the life sciences. It has 580 member organizations -- including Medtronic, the Mayo Clinic, Cargill and the University of Minnesota -- and is the largest organization of its kind in the country.

Kneeland has been working in Assistant Professor of Biology Kevin Crisp's lab for a year, including a 10-week research project this summer and ongoing work this fall. Her research examines the role of microglia, a type of immune cell in the nervous system, in the response of neural tissue to injury. In humans and other vertebrates, microglia are a component of an inflammatory response in damaged neural tissue that appears to exacerbate injury and impair regeneration. Kneeland is studying this cell type in earthworms, which show a remarkable ability to repair their nervous system following injury. For example, Crisp notes, after Kneeland surgically cuts the earthworm equivalent of the spinal cord in half, it heals within 48 hours.

"In earthworms, microglia rapidly migrate to injured sites, arriving in large numbers within hours of the lesion, where they may actually facilitate repair processes, such as by promoting sprouting -- or new growth -- from damaged nerve fibers," Crisp says.

By better understanding the cellular processes underlying neural repair in earthworms, Kneeland hopes she may be able to identify therapeutic targets for treatment of neural damage in humans. Along with several other St. Olaf students, Kneeland also presented her research at the Society for Neuroscience last month.

Contact Kari VanDerVeen at 507-786-3970 or vanderve@stolaf.edu.