Date of Completion

2017

Document Type

Honors College Thesis

Department

Biology

Thesis Type

Honors College, College of Arts and Science Honors

First Advisor

Sayamwong Hammack, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Eugene Delay, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Rona Delay, Ph.D.

Keywords

Notch, Notch1, Taste, Cell Signaling, Taste buds, Taste Sensory Cells

Abstract

Cyclophosphamide (CYP) was one of the first chemotherapy drugs developed and used to treat several types of cancer, by disrupting proliferative cells. Unfortunately, CYP is unable to differentiate between cancerous cells and healthy cells turning over which ultimately kills normally functioning cells, including those of the taste system. This loss of taste cells may result in dysgeusia (altered sense of taste), hypogeusia (reduced taste ability) or ageusia (inability to detect any tastes), eventually leading to malnutrition and poor prognosis for patients. The notch signaling pathway is one of the most important pathways involved in the differentiation and fate of neural stem cells (Hitoshi et al., 2002). A previous study looked at genes expressed in developing circumvallate taste cells and found that notch signaling remains active in adult mice to determine cell lineage as the sensory cells are continuously replaced (Seta, Seta, & Barlow, 2003). The current research uses immunohistochemistry to identify the presence of notch signaling following injury by CYP. It was hypothesized that if Notch1 is involved in taste cell replacement, we predict the Notch1 signal should be amplified following challenge by cyclophosphamide.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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