(MUSIC)
My name is Jenica Tapocik. I'm a staff scientist at
NIH.
Right now I'm studying addiction, specifically
alcoholism and also opiate addiction as well.
So I'm actually a native Maryland. I grew up in Montgomery County.
I was always interested in science when I was young. I didn't really have any
experience with neuroscience
at first and it was always something that interests me, because I would walk into the
biology program and I'd see these cool pictures of neurons
that were lit up in green. And I was like, "Oh wow...this is so neat. This is something I could be
really, really interested in."
That is when really struck me...
as I...I really wanted to become a neuroscience researcher.
I'm doing behavior research, molecular research...seeing what's going on in the
brain.
Some of my family members do struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction and
in knowing that...I didn't know that that research insisted. I didn't know people
did that.
And when I found out that I could learn more about and understand it and see why
these people become addicted
and how can I help them...that really,
really made me interested in doing that research. There's a
couple different behavioral paradigms we do to
understand addiction...to see what are the behavioral consequences of becoming
addicted and how
do people become addicted. What is different from
the...the mechanisms in their brain versus somebody that is not addicted.
So we do a lot of molecular research to understand that. We look at
the neural networks...how they're connected...how do they...
how do they get disrupted after addiction. What genes are being affected
by that.
So what gene is being up or down regulated. And if we manipulated that gene,
could we reverse the behaviors that cause addiction. So those are kind of the main
things that I
study and research in the lab. We do do some microscopic work, so what we can do
is say we find a
a gene of interest or a protein interest... we can tag
that gene or protein with a fluorescence tag.
We can look at that under the microscope in say, "Oh where is that
gene or protein located in the brain by the fluorescence tag."
So this right here...this it
is a spine, so it's part of a neuron
thats in a brain. And we stained it with
with a red fluorescent protein. We look at it and see how are the spines changing.
So here...this is a technique called immunohistochemistry.
So what we're doing here is we are actually staining
our sections with an antibody.
And here we also
tag that particular antibody with a fluorescence protein...
so we're able to visualize it on the microscope and see which...
where and how much of the protein is actually being activated after we
run our preclinical models. So the
things that we find within our laboratory we're actually able to
basically walk next door and talk to the clinical
researchers to see if it's something that we can do to bring to the clinic to
help
people with addiction.
What I really love about my job is that I know that I can actually help people
because I've seen it. I've actually seen it. I have
done preclinical research. I have
actually found targets that we think are involved in addiction.
we've found them to be effective in our preclinical model
and we have walked next door and started
a clinical protocol to actually start treating addicts and that
is what really, really gets me going with this research.
It really makes me passionate...passionate about what I do.
(MUSIC)