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Parkinson’s disease affects neurons (brain cells or nerve cells) in people and causes many difficulties for those people. Scientists have found out what some of the problems with the neurons are — and one of those possible problems is with the mitochondria in the neurons.

Mitochondria are the parts of our cells that convert the energy from the food we eat (carbohydrates, sugars, fats, etc.) into a form of energy that the cells can use (ATP).

Neurons (brain cells or nerve cells) use a lot of energy so are very affected by mitochondrial problems and mitochondria seem to be part of what is going wrong in affected Parkinson’s disease neurons.

All the exact details of what is going wrong in Parkinson’s disease neurons are not yet known. It is unclear if the same parts of neurons always go wrong in all the neurons of all people with Parkinson’s disease or different parts of the neurons go wrong in different people or in different neurons.

Since I have learned a lot about mitochondria in my previous job and I was very curious about the details of what goes wrong in Parkinson’s disease neurons, I decided to study the details about what goes wrong with mitochondria in those neurons.

During my research for my Ph.D., I used fruit flies as my model system to study a different aspect of biology. Now, I knew that other researchers had figured out some really exciting details about what’s going wrong in Parkinson’s, all in fly models and what they found in flies applies to what going on in the brains of people with Parkinson’s.

So I am now studying the details of what goes wrong with mitochondria in neurons affected by Parkinson’s disease in the fruit fly model system.  I hope that understanding more about the details of what’s going wrong in Parkinson’s neurons will help us to design better treatments in the long run.

I am also testing new chemical compounds created by some of my colleagues in Chemistry at our University to see if they improve the symptoms of my Parkinson’s flies.

The Parkinson’s flies don’t climb as well as the normal flies — I am using that difference to see what happens when different parts of the mitochondria are defective as well. So I run races with the different flies to see if they get faster or slower depending which parts are defective.

A typical day starts in the lab. Flies are more awake and more sleepy at different times of the day, just like we are!  They’re more awake in the mornings, so I try to do all my fruit fly races before lunch time.

I go to my office to have my lunch & to do any work I might need to do on the computer.

Then in the afternoon, I’m back in the lab doing more fly work. I make food for the flies to grow on, transfer the flies to new food, cross different kind of flies to each other, and collect the right kinds of flies to do the different experiments.

Some of my experiments involve fruit fly races, others involve dissecting the brains out of the fruit flies to image individual neurons under a microscope & the specific neurons glow red under special light! — that’s very cool to see!