Kelly Maune and Elena Cahill

Abstract:

Neuronal signals such as action potentials are generated by ions flowing through transmembrane ion channel proteins. Ion channels are highly conserved across animal taxa and have been divided into various structural families. One of these is a family of voltage-gated potassium channels called the EAG family. EAG channels are further subdivided into eag, elk, and erg subtypes. At least eight EAG channels, 3 eag, 2 elk, and 3 erg types, appear to be present in the medicinal leech (Northcutt et al., 2018). Here we report on the completion of a set of eight RNA probes targeting the messenger RNAs coding for each leech EAG channel. We used in situ hybridization to visualize the expression pattern of these mRNAs in the leech central nervous system. This poster details the process by which we synthesized two eag probes over the summer and summarizes our attempts to correlate probe staining patterns with expected mRNA expression levels (Heath-Heckman et al., 2021).