DELAWARE: INBRE investigator lead PI on $973,923 NSF grant for brain chemical research
NSF has awarded a three-year, $973,923 research grant to Delaware State University in support of a neuroscience research project. The grant will support a research project that focuses on the brain chemical acetylcholine. Hakeem Lawal, a Delaware INBRE Pilot Project investigator, is the Principal Investigator of the grant, Jianli Sun, Director of the Cell Electrophysiology Core in the University’s Delaware Institute of Science and Technology, is the Co-PI.
The brain chemical acetylcholine plays a critical role in the control of how we learn and remember. Accordingly, a defect in its regulation has been associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Yet much remains unknown about how acetylcholine is itself regulated in the brain.
This funded research is aimed at tackling that question by seeking to uncover the mechanism through which acetylcholine is released from brain cells using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a research model system.