Summer Student Report 2019

The increasing prevalence of metabolic diseases in many countries over the past decades has prompted inquiry into the causes and potential therapies. Agouti-related peptide (AgRP)/Neuropeptide Y (NPY) neurons, located in the arcuate nucleus in the hypothalamus, have been identified as having a significant role in responding to and promoting feeding behaviors (Baver, et al, 2014 ). Activity in fasted mice, or mice on high-fat diets, show increased baseline AgRP neuronal activity. This project set out with aims to develop and deploy a manual cell capture protocol for NPY -GFP neurons and confirm the baseline feeding behaviors of a novel CRISR AgRP-cre mouse. The Cy values of POMC and AgRP expression from the qPCR completed on the pilot samples, confirms the method as a way to gather clean samples for further sequencing. In addition, the feeding studies with tlJ.e parent strains and crossed mice confirmed that feeding behaviors remained the same regardless of the ASAP2s expression in the AgRP neurons