On this week's podcast episode of #DivingDeeper, we're talking about science, nature, art...and worms with MBL scientist B. Duygu Özpolat . Headphone Listen now on Spotify & Apple Podcasts: http://linktr.ee/ShowMustGoShow
https://art-lab-presents-diving-deeper.simplecast.com/episodes/conversation-with-duygu-ozpolat
Labmızda yaptığımız çalışmalara dair genel bir fikir edinmek isterseniz EkoEvo Derneği ile yaptığımız bu sunum ve söyleşiyi izleyebilirsiniz. EkoEvo’ya ve Dilşad’a çok teşekkür ederiz.
Özet:
Çok hücreli canlılar, eşeyli üreyebilmek için embriyonun gelişimi sırasında üreme hücrelerini yapacak hücre hattını oluştururlar. Biyolojide genel olarak kabul edilen görüş, bu üreme hücresi öncüllerinin, vücudun kalanını inşa edecek somatik hücrelerden ayrı ve özel hücreler olduğudur. Öyle ki, eğer üreme hücre hattı zarar görür veya deneysel olarak (veya ameliyatla) vücuttan alınırsa, somatic hücreler üreme hücrelerinin yerine geçemez ve canlı kısırlaşır. Fakat, bu genel olarak kabul edilen görüşe ters düşecek şekilde pek çok canlı, üreme hücrelerini rejenere edebilme yeteneğine sahiptir. Bu seminerde soma-üreme gücresi (germ) ayrımının geçerliliğini inceleyeceğiz. Üreme hücrelerini rejenere edebilen canlıların, yaygın olarak kabul gören bu temel ilkeyi sorgulamamıza neden sebep olduğunu, ve üreme hücresi rejenerasyonunun sağlık, hücre programlaması, popülasyon genetiği ve evrime kadar varan etkilerinin neler olabileceğini tartışacağız.
If you work on Spiralians join us at Spiraliabase, a community of scientists sharing ideas and meeting virtually for lab meetings.
Duygu has been one of the organizers of the monthly Virtual Lab Meetings, and you can find the recordings of these meetings and sign up for the future meetings on the Spiraliabase website.
Also don’t forget to follow Spiraliabase on Twitter!
We welcome our new team member, Bria, who is a new Research Assistant at the Özpolat lab. She will work on germline regeneration in Platynereis. Bria graduated this past spring from Brown University with dual honors in biology and english nonfiction. Though she didn’t see the ocean until age 13, she's wanted to study marine organisms ever since she saw the episode “She sells seashells by the sea shore” from What’s New Scooby Doo. Bria first came to the MBL as a student researcher in Dr. Irina Arkhipova's lab, and she's thrilled to once again be part of the scientific community here!
We are sad to see her go, but so excited for her new adventures in graduate school in Europe! Goodbye Emily. You will be sorely missed.
We are thrilled to share the news that our lab is now funded by NIH NIGMS with a MIRA grant to study germline regeneration in Platynereis dumerilii using live imaging, transgenics, and single cell sequencing.
Tune back in for new job opportunities at the Özpolat lab!
Kate and Duygu will be visiting ASU for the Center for Biology and Society conversation series. Date: 22 January 2020. Join us for a conversation on Germline Regeneration.
We will be at the ASCB/EMBO meeting in Washington D.C. in December to hold a roundtable discussion on "Developing approaches for testing gene function in post-embryonic stages". Please join us and spread the word! Follow us on Twitter for updates.
Kate MacCord and Duygu submitted a review discussing germline immortality and continuity in light of recent research on induced pluripotent stem cells and germline regeneration in several different research organisms.
We have posted a preprint of this manuscript on Zenodo, which you can download from here. If you have any feedback, we would love to hear from you! Post a comment here, or send us an email.
A) Which component of the germline is immortal and continuous? Stars: points of change. Cells originating from germline (G) in blue, from soma (S) in yellow. B) Distribution of germline regeneration across animal phyla. Gray indicates the phylogenetic location of traditional model organisms which cannot regenerate the germline in vivo (indicated by "X"). Check marks indicate clades in which there is evidence for germline regeneration.
Happy to announce that the Özpolat lab has been awarded a seed grant by The Microbiome Center to look into the role of microbiome in segmented worm regeneration. We will collaborate with Jessica Mark Welch (MBL) and A. Murat Eren (UChicago) on this project.
Kate will be giving a talk on Germline Regeneration in Metazoans at the Second meeting of the PhilInBioMed international network in October in Bordeaux, France.
Duygu will be the keynote speaker at the Young Investigators Science Retreat at Stowers Institute in September.
We have some great news! Alexa Bely (University of Maryland), Elaine Seaver (Whitney Labs) and B. Duygu Özpolat (MBL) have been awarded an NSF EDGE grant to develop functional approaches for studying regeneration in annelids. We have a webpage and a Twitter account.
We will be running workshops so follow us on Twitter and through our website to get updates. We also plan on sharing progress without waiting for publications, so we hope this project will benefit more than just our 3 labs.
Finally, we have two research technician jobs available (one at UMD, Maryland with Alexa Bely; the other at Whitney Labs, Florida with Elaine Seaver. We are an awesome team, come join!
For more info on these positions, check out the website.
WEDGE: Worms on the Edge
Emily and Emma will be presenting posters at the Society for Developmental Biology Meeting in Boston. Come check the posters out and chat with them!
The International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology meeting will take place in Oslo, Norway this year. Kate MacCord will give a talk on Germ line Regeneration.
WCAI's Living Lab radio program this Sunday, May 19 at Noon on WGBH (Boston) and again on Monday at 9 AM and 7 PM on WCAI (Cape Cod and Islands)
You can find the article and the recording here.
This blog post was initially published in Turkish on March 1st, 2013. For the mental health awareness month of May 2019, I decided to translate and share it here (it has very little edits from the original). This year, I have been encouraged to be more open about my mental health struggles, and my path to a more stable and happier life as an adult and academic. I still struggle, learning and growing never ends. But I have learned how to manage my mental health. I am so thankful to everyone else sharing their stories openly. Just like their stories helped me, I hope my story will help you.
The last time I posted here, I was in a great mood thanks to having started working out regularly. Since then, I have continued my regular workouts. So much so that, I even decided to run a half-marathon in Washington D.C.! For a while, I would either run or swim in the mornings on weekdays. But nowadays I am down to working out 3 days per week. Every day I run or swim I feel so much better (though there are exceptions, which I will talk about below), even if I wake up feeling down on that particular day. I even lost some extra weight at a healthy rate. So, it is good so far. No, not just good, it is wonderful!
Photo: From a morning run when I was in New York
However… I was hoping my mood swings, my brain’s “short-circuits”, my depression and anxieties were going to disappear with regular exercise, or at least would get largely under control. I was so excited about this new life prospect! Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out to be that way.
First of all, I am going through a tough time, when I am particularly vulnerable to feel depressed and anxious. We have funding issues at the lab I am working at. I have been aware of the situation since the summer, and my advisor and I tried to get more funds to close this funding gap. Unfortunately, our efforts did not pan out. Because of all this, I have been living in uncertainty since August: For how much longer will I be able to stay here at this lab, and in the US? Will this other application come through? (No) How about this other one? (No)… I tried to focus on 2-week-long aims and tried not to get paralyzed with worrying about the future. I continued to exercise regularly so that I would not lose my mind.
Meanwhile, two things happened: First, I started journaling my mood, and my exercise and meditation routine. Every night, before going to sleep, I recorded how I felt during the day (before and after exercise/meditation). At first, I didn’t have a particular aim in mind for journaling, I just wanted to have a record of all this. Second, I’ve been to Japan. (I’ll explain why I’m telling you this detail in a minute).
Photo: The notebook I am using for journaling my mood/exercise/meditation.
These were the circumstances when I periodically found myself in severe depression (3 times that lasted a couple days each, since November), even though I had been exercising and meditating regularly. Perhaps “severe depression” is not the right terminology, please feel free to correct me in the comments section. Here is what I mean by it: crying all day long and not being able to do anything else. Can rarely get out of the bed. This lasts several days. Eventually recovering and feeling normal. While depressed, feeling completely hopeless, seeing nothing but darkness in my future, feeling like a huge failure, feeling worthless, so so so worthless. But the weird thing is, this same person on “non-depressed” days (the days other people see and know me) is a person who feels strong, who is hard-working, self-confident, a person who sees the opportunity in hardship, who is able to think that things will be all right. You can imagine how confusing it is to experience these swings, both for me and for the people around me who are close enough so I let them see my mood swings.
At last, about two weeks ago, when one of those depression fits held me by the legs again like a cruel giant, and slapped me to the wall, I said “That’s it!” and gave my therapist a call. I had not seen him in a while. He squeezed me into his schedule immediately. On the morning of my appointment day, I took my mood journal, and to better understand what’s happening to me, I decided to make a summary of my entries. While working on that summary I noticed “Wowowowow, I collected actual data!” It was one of the rare moments when I wanted to hug myself. I’m a scientist! I collect data! Transferred all the data points to a spreadsheet. Plotted a graph. Applied the days I had my period onto this mood score graph. Marked the times I had the nervous breakdowns (i.e. severe depression periods). And “Eureka! There is a pattern!” Here it is:
The blue line in this graph represents my mood score from negative to positive (black line is “zero”). The magenta star represents the nervous breakdowns, the salmon/pink columns are the days I had my period. The obvious pattern is that, during this time frame, I had 3 nervous breakdowns right before my periods. I didn’t have a nervous breakdown only before one period, though my body/mind certainly attempted but could not succeed breaking me down (16-18 December). And to me it is so clear why I was off the hook that month: I was traveling in Japan for 10 days (represented by the bar in teal green) and I had a great time. I always feel better when I travel to a new place. My body must have stocked up on serotonin so much that I was in a better mood in general that month (as you may have noticed from the blue line being above zero mostly that month). The months after this have the repeating pattern of “normal-ish” or “meh“ moods followed by a nervous breakdown the week before my period starts.
With my very strong findings, I went to my therapist. “This is the situation dear Tom”, I said. He paused for a bit and he said, “My dear, you have PMDD”. “What the heck is that?!”, I asked. “Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder”, he replied. Careful! This is not your usual PMS (which is already horrible). PMS is something most women experience to varying degrees. “PMDD is exactly what you describe. You feel pretty normal until it hits about 10 to 7 days before your period, and your mood changes drastically, much more severely than it would in PMS. If regular exercise isn’t helping (looks like it isn’t in your case), the other options are trying to go on birth control pills or going back on being antidepressants.” NOOOOOOOO NOT ANTIDEPRESSANTS!* I worked so hard to quit them. Ok let’s try birth control pills. (In theory, BCPs were to regulate my hormones, and potentially then prevent PMDD).
So, this is what’s been going on. I wanted to share all this because it is important to me. I feel like people take mental health issues too lightly or stigmatize. If you struggle with mental health problems, you may be afraid of being seen as “weak” or “spoiled” or “lazy” or whatever, fill in the blanks with negative verbiage. A lot of times, it is not just the fear of others calling you these things, but you yourself believing in these, and you end up hating yourself and beating yourself up. I am sharing my experience to bring more awareness to these issues. Please do not hesitate to get professional help (if you have the means). Please spend the time to know yourself, your patterns. If by sharing this I can help a couple of people, I will be so happy.
I have an appointment next week with the women’s health center to discuss birth control pills. We will see if they will help. I’ll share my experience as I go. And I will continue to journal my mood.
PS: Here is an article that explains the difference between PMDD and PMS.
An update to this blog post (in 2017): Birth control pills didn’t do it for me. I felt terrible on the one type of pill I tried. Eventually, what ended up helping was getting an IUD (intra-uterine device) in 2014 (I got Mirena). These hormonal IUDs release hormones locally, and they do not have the systemic effect the pills have. I miraculously stopped having the severe swings, though I still have light PMS-type mood changes. I also do not have cramps anymore as a bonus! Everybody reacts differently to these different options. The bottom line is, spend the time to try different options and hang in there! You’ll find a solution.
*Another update (in 2019): Even though my IUD helped a lot with getting some part of the troubles under control, after starting my new faculty position, I started having insomnia very regularly. (I had been suffering from this to some extent while in Paris, but it was manageable.) Even though at times I felt like I never felt happier in my life (thanks to being with my wonderful partner, finally living in the same place together, and having the dream job), I also started having to deal with lots of new anxieties that came with the new job. After spending a year trying to remedy the insomnia through not drinking coffee except in the morning, trying not to eat things that upset my stomach in the evening, mindfulness, reading books and staying away from screens once in bed, and therapy (I cannot thank my therapist enough for the growth she helped me achieve)… I mean I tried, and tried, and tried, and finally decided that it is time to go back on antidepressants. And life has been so much better. I am on a low dose, which helped so much with my sleep, but didn’t lose my motivation like it happened the first time.(this was one of the main reasons I had quit antidepressants back then). I hope you find your solution, and strength to look for a solution, whatever it may be.
Duygu has joined the Philosophy in Biology and Medicine network as one of the science committee members.
Duygu will give a Science Before Supper talk at the Falmouth Library.
Details here.
Duygu will give a talk at the NESDB Meeting in April.
