Previous Seed Grant Winners
Where are they now?
In 2002, Anne McElroy of the Marine Science Research Center , was awarded a seed grant for her proposal, "Development of a Transgenic Fish Model for use in Assessing Genotoxins in the Environment."
The
manuscript below was submitted in June of 2005 to the journal Marine Environmental
Research describing the work funded by the BNL Seed Grant project. Dr. McElroy
is currently working on two other manuscripts that describe the broader project
in detail.
The work funded by the Seed Grant has been instrumental in providing baseline
data needed to show that the transgenic medaka embryo model for mutagenesis
is comparable to traditional rodent models and to the much more labor intensive
adults medaka model used previously by collaborator Richard Winn. Dr. Winn has
now adopted this approach in other investigations.
The collaboration between Dr. McElroy's laboratory, with Dick Setlow at BNL
and Richard Winn at the University of Georgia has led to participation in two
conferences aimed at using their test species, the medaka, as an animal model
for human disease. The team's work has also led Dr. McElroy to establish a breeding
colony of medaka and zebra fish in herlaboratory, and several short research
trips are planned for the spring of 2006 to learn new approaches for assessing
functional responses in fish embryos (one to Stanford, one to the National Marines
Fisheries Northwest and Alaska Science Center in Seattle Washington, and possibly
one to Duke). Drs. Winn and McElroy intend to submit a major grant to continue
this work later this spring to the EPA, and possibly to the NIEHS.