Cybelle Tabilas
Hi, my name is Cybelle Tabilas. I grew up in Woodland, California and I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.
I first became interested in science as a young child through television specials and series. In an episode of The Magic School Bus called Inside Ralphie, Ms. Frizzle and the class try to figure out what Ralphie is sick with and this sparked my interest in human illness. By watching shows like this, I was introduced to a world that I could not see or control and this is when I decided I wanted to understand the mechanisms that drive the world.
For me, a career in research means standing between the line of knowledge and the unknown and having the tools, power, and creativity to decide how you want to cross that barrier.
The research area I am most interested in is immunology.
I am still unsure of what my ultimate career goals would be. I would love to do research for a government institute like the CDC or NIH to address public health issues in infectious diseases, but I am also interested in becoming a professor and mentoring the next generation of scientists at a liberal arts college similar to the one I graduated from.
I always knew I wanted to take a gap year between my undergraduate education and graduate school. When I learned about PREP, it sounded like the perfect mixture of what I imagined my gap year to be. It would allow me to experience and understand what life as a first
year graduate student would entail while doing an intensive and independent yearlong project in a subject I was interested in.
I chose to become part of PREP@UGA because of the diversity of faculty mentors offered to its scholars, the quality of research UGA creates, and the support the program offered. PREP@UGA emphasized its dedication to its scholars success by allowing us to take graduate level classes, take a GRE prep course, have ability to travel to topic specific conferences, and form meaningful professional relationships with the research community. Without these resources, I would not feel as confident or prepared in embarking on the graduate path.
I hope my year at PREP@UGA will provide me with the basic resources I need to excel in a competitive graduate program.
I am spending the year in Dr. Nancy Manley’s lab with Dr. Julie Gordon as my research mentor.
Objectives and hypothesis:
The notch signaling pathway is highly conserved amongst multicellular organisms and it regulates cell fate specification during development and tissue maintenance. There are four Notch receptors in vertebrates and for my project, I will be focusing on Notch1. When the Notch1 receptor comes into contact with a ligand, it induces a proteolytic cleavage of the Notch1 Intracellular Domain which then enters the nucleus and modifies gene expression.
Hypothesis: Preliminary data generated by the Manley Lab shows “a clear phenotype after thymic epithelial cell specific Notch1 deletion” suggesting there is a connection between Notch1 and TECs. We hypothesize Notch1 is required for TEC formation and maintenance therefore deleting Notch1 will result in an abnormal thymic epithileal cell phenotype. My project is a time-course analysis of TECs using fetal stage to post-natal stage mice. I will be focusing on the earlier stages of TEC development in relation to the absence of Notch1. By identifying the earliest time point in which deletion of Notch1 is able to affect the progenitor cell phenotype of the mice, we can begin to understand the role of Notch in TECs.
Techniques:
In this project, I will be utilizing cre-lox technology to create conditional Notch1 knockout mutants in thymic epithelial cells. Foxn1 is expressed in TECs, therefore crossing FoxN1 cre mice with a conditional Notch1 mouse strain will delete Notch in TECs.
To analyze the role of Notch1 in the development of TECs, I will use immunohistochemistry to stain for TEC progenitor markers to identify meaningful differences between the Notch1 mutant thymus and control thymus.
My name is Cybelle Tabilas and I am a PREP@UGA scholar.