Honours Project 2016

Characterization of Alpha1-adrenergic receptor expression by peripheral blood leukocytes in Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome

Short project description & main objectives:
Inflammation is a normal immune response to an infection or injury with the intent to eliminate the cause and begin the healing and repair of the tissue. For reasons that are predominantly unknown, inflammation can continue to persist resulting in chronic inflammatory diseases. There is an emerging interest in the role the nervous system may play in regulating the immune response. For some years our group has been interested in a class of nervous system receptor termed adrenergic receptors (AR). These receptors are the targets for noradrenaline (NA) and adrenaline (AD) and are divided into two primary types, alpha (αAR) and beta (βAR), which can be further divided into nine different subtypes. Recent studies have shown that different AR subtypes may be abnormally expressed under chronic inflammatory disease states such as asthma, arthritis, hyper- and hypo-thyroidism and chronic regional pain syndrome (CRPS). The αAR group have been linked to pro-inflammatory actions in some diseases with stimulation resulting in an increase in pro-inflammatory mediators. Changes in the expression of these receptors may play an important role in the interaction between the nervous system and the immune system in chronic inflammation. However, there are conflicting reports regarding the expression of AR subtypes not only in diseases but also on normal cells in general, in particular immune cells.
The overall aim of the project is to examine the expression of α1AR mRNA using a new commercially available technique that detects mRNA by flow cytometry (RNA-flow) on peripheral blood leukocytes of patients with CRPS. In this project you will gain experience with collecting and isolating leukocytes from blood, flow cytometry and cell culture.
This project will help provide a more detailed understanding of αAR subtype expression on different immune cells in healthy and CRPS patients. Ultimately, we believe this will lead to new classes of treatments aimed at treating or preventing chronic inflammatory diseases by targeting specific ARs on specific immune cells.
Principal supervisor: / Dr Phil Stumbles
Other supervisors: / Prof Peter Drummond
Contact details for furtherinformation: / Dr Phil Stumbles ()
Closing date for applications:
Start & finish date of project: / Start: Beginning Semester 2, 2016 Finish: End Semester 1, 2017
Available part-time? / No
Research centre/group: / Molecular and Biomedical Sciences
Desired background of applicants: / Biomedical Science/Molecular Biology

School of VLS16 May 2016