Timme-Laragy Awarded Nearly $6M in NIH Grants for Zebrafish Research Projects
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Zebrafish have emerged as a critical tool for researchers looking into what causes certain diseases in humans and Alicia Timme-Laragy, professor of environmental health sciences, has been awarded a pair of multi-million dollar grants to further her work with the tropical fish.
Timme-Laragy, along with collaborators Craig Albertson, Gerald Downs and Rolf Karlstrom from the College of Natural Sciences, and Erik Learned-Miller from the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, were awarded a four-year, $2.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to enhance equipment across four independently run zebrafish laboratories on campus.
Timme-Laragy says the upgraded equipment will help researchers evaluate different sources of variability that take place in zebrafish with multiple different endpoints, such as behavior, organ growth and nutrient content.
“As a zebrafish community on campus, we have a great opportunity to leverage these four different zebrafish labs that all run independently and evaluate potential sources of data variability that are addressable. Ultimately, this will improve the rigor and reproducibility of the data we’re collecting with zebrafish as a biomedical model,” she says.
Timme-Laragy is also the recipient of a second NIH grant to study what causes pancreatic malformations, which can lead to obesity, pancreatitis and diabetes.
That five-year, $3.3 million award will help drive research, again using zebrafish, to gather more information about whether early exposure to PFAS chemicals affect the pancreas. PFAS substances are used in a wide range of applications—from non-stick cookware and fast-food wrappers to firefighting foam—and have been linked to pollution of drinking water sources.
Timme-Laragy points to research by recent UMass Amherst graduate student Madeline Tompach, a former Timme-Laragy lab member.
“She found when fish embryos are exposed to PFOS, which is the primary component in these AFFF (aqueous film-forming foam) legacy mixtures that have contaminated the environment, not only does it affect pancreas development so you end up with a shorter, smaller pancreas, but even at lower concentrations, where you haven’t affected pancreas size, the function is still impaired,” Timme-Laragy says.
Further research shows the pancreas in zebrafish can recover in size when exposed to PFAS chemicals, but it is unknown whether functionality does as well, Timme-Laragy added. One aspect of the research could include the causes for recovery in the zebrafish and how that could be transferred to humans.
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Alicia Timme-Laragy
