First person – Anthony Agudelo

doi:10.1242/bio.057216

Abstract

ABSTRACTFirst Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Anthony Agudelo is first author on ‘Age-dependent degeneration of an identified adult leg motor neuron in a Drosophila SOD1 model of ALS’, published in BiO. Anthony conducted the research described in this article while an undergraduate Research Assistant in Dr Geoff Stilwell's lab at Rhode Island College, Providence, USA. He is now a Research Assistant in the lab of Dr James Padbury at Rhode Island College, Providence, USA, investigating using computational biology methods to shed light on the pathology of complex diseases.

Highlights

How would you explain the main findings of your paper to non-scientific family and friends? Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS is a progressive neuromuscular disease, individuals diagnosed with ALS will typically only survive 3 to 5 years after being diagnosed
I am working in the Padbury lab utilizing computational biology techniques including differential gene expression analysis, pathway analysis, machine learning and deconvolution to better understand two complex diseases, pre-eclampsia and pre-term birth
When I try to explain the work that I do to my family and friends concisely I will say something along the lines of “we gave fruit flies ALS and it’s my job to see if they show similar characteristics to people with ALS”, the idea being that if we can understand how ALS works in flies hopefully it can shed light on how the disease works in humans. This explanation can be somewhat simplistic and so when I say “we gave fruit flies ALS” what I mean is our lab inserted a mutation in a gene called superoxide dismutase (SOD1) that is known to cause ALS when mutated in humans into a fruit fly

Summary

Introduction

How would you explain the main findings of your paper to non-scientific family and friends? Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS is a progressive neuromuscular disease, individuals diagnosed with ALS will typically only survive 3 to 5 years after being diagnosed. Anthony Agudelo is first author on ‘Age-dependent degeneration of an identified adult leg motor neuron in a Drosophila SOD1 model of ALS’, published in BiO.

Results

Conclusion