According to the World Health Organization nervous system disorders and injuries affect billions of people worldwide, resulting in physical and cognitive impairments that impact their daily lives. As a result of the high incidence and debilitating effects of neurological injuries, nerve regeneration is an important field of research. During neuroregeneration RhoGTPases regulate various aspects of dendrite and axonal outgrowth and growth cone motility. Specifically, Cdc42 and Rac positively regulate neurite outgrowth and dendritic spine formation, and Rho inhibits neurite extension. Previous research has shown that normal growth cone motility depends on an optimal range of intracellular Ca2+ concentrations, and that Ca2+ signals can regulate the activity of Cdc42 in neurons. Our goal is to analyze the effects of RhoGTPases and intracellular Ca2+ signals on neurogenesis by treating Neuro2a cells expressing constitutively active and dominant negative forms of GFP-tagged RhoGTPases with the calcium ionophore A23-187 that will increase the intracellular Ca2+ concentration and examining the number of cells with neural extensions as well as the extension length. Analyzing the effect of Ca2+ signals and dominant negative and constitutively active forms of RhoGTPases in parallel will allow us to gain an increased understanding of their combined effects on neuroregeneration.

Effect of Ca2+ signaling on Rho GTPases during neuroregeneration

253rd National Meeting (2017)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.