Valerie Kuehne Undergraduate Research Awards (VKURA)

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This UVic award provides an opportunity for first year students to gain research-enriched and applied experiences in their discipline or field of study. Students gain first-hand experience in planning and undertaking research or creative works.

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Browsing Valerie Kuehne Undergraduate Research Awards (VKURA) by Subject "aging"

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    An Assessment of Aging Systems in Zooarchaeology
    (2022-09-07) Martiskainen, Ellis
    The purpose of my internship was to acquaint myself with the methods that are used to determine the age-at-death of zooarchaeological finds, and to assess whether the systems that have been in use for the past fifty years are adequate. I studied the skeletal anatomy of mammals for some time. Then I did intensive reading of the literature regarding the aging of pigs, goats, sheep and cattle. I found that many aging systems have been based off of small populations of animals or unreliable data. In the future, more aging studies should be done on populations of known-age animals which are allowed to live their full lifespan. I also analyzed some data on goats found at the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük. I found that it is difficult to perfectly replicate aging done via Silver’s (1969) system without seeing bones in person, and noted some biases in which bones survive in the archaeological record.
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    clec-5 as a genetic regulator of reproductive aging in Caenorhabditis elegans
    (University of Victoria, 2024) Tikhonova, Anna
    The research aims to investigate how the female reproductive system can be influenced by external factors such as age and nutrition. This study uses the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans due to its high genetic conservation across to mammals, including the regulatory pathway that controls reproductive functions. In preliminary research, C. elegans displayed accelerated reproductive aging and rapid oocyte deterioration in glucose enriched environments. If we select 10 evolutionary conserved genes appearing to be most elevated in oocytes, these will play a role in reproductive regulation. My study also intends to examine the effect of downregulating these genes to determine the potential genetic regulators. The influences will be evaluated based on specimens’ late-mating capacity— capability to produce offspring when mated later in adulthood. For this procedure, hypochlorite-synchronized eggs are produced and reach adulthood, when the downregulation of genes is conducted. After late-mating, the progeny will be assessed for the percentage of worms able to reproduce. Results should provide insight into the effects of genes on reproductive aging, and by extension, influences on human reproductive systems.
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