Orono High graduate studies alcohol, brain

ORONO – Drinking wine, beer and other alcoholic beverages has well-known effects on moods and behavior and scientists have long suspected that changes may occur in more fundamental brain functions as well.

For her senior honors thesis, Kristy Townsend of Orono, an undergraduate in the University of Maine Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Molecular Biology, will work with a team of UMaine scientists to determine if alcohol also affects circadian rhythms – the body’s regular day-to-day pattern of activity.

Townsend, a 1998 graduate of Orono High School, will focus on serotonin, a chemical messenger and an essential mood-regulating neurochemical. She will use two types of antibodies to monitor serotonin levels in specific regions of the brains of rats fed diets with varying amounts of alcohol.

One of the antibodies acts as kind of a molecular beacon because it glows when it binds to a target molecule.

This fall, Townsend is feeding 10 rats over a period of several weeks. Her project is an extension of ongoing behavioral neuroscience research in a Little Hall lab directed by Alan Rosenwasser, professor of psychology.

The project highlights an area of study in which she would like to see UMaine become more active in the future.

Townsend, the daughter of David and Roberta Townsend, first became interested in neuroscience in middle school, she said.

“I’m attracted to neuroscience because there are so many different interesting areas,” she said. “In the future, I’d like to study neurotoxicology – how environmental pollutants affect the brain, and possibly Alzheimer’s disease.”

As a biopsychologist, Rosenwasser studies the relationship between the nervous system, mood and behavior. He and other scientists have documented a relationship exists between depression and circadian rhythms.

“Serotonin could provide a link between these two phenomena. To this point however, researchers have not determined whether depression causes a disruption in circadian rhythms or the other way around.” Rosenwasser said.

“It’s my belief that we may be looking at a third factor, altered serotonin levels, for example, that may be expressed both as depression and as a disruption in circadian rhythms,” he said.

Townsend will work with a team that includes Rosenwasser, Carol Kim in the department and Mike Opitz and Dawna Beane in Cooperative Extension. Her project will provide an opportunity for psychologists and biochemists at UMaine to collaborate on neuroscience research.

“Neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field involving psychologists, neurologists, biochemists and other scientists. The Society of Neuroscience holds one of the largest annual scientific meetings in the country,” Rosenwasser said.

Research on circadian rhythms has practical benefits such as better understanding of problems associated with late-night shift work, workplace accidents and long-distance travel across time zones.

In her laboratory work, Townsend will look for serotonin in a pinhead-sized region of the brain known as the SCN or suprachiasmatic nucleus. The SCN is part of the hypothalamus, a brain region that controls basic activities such as sleep, eating and sex drive. In evolutionary terms, it is ancient.

Scientists have described the SCN as the body’s biological clock.

Townsend will expose the SCN from the brains of the rats to two antibodies, one that binds directly to serotonin and another that binds to the first antibody. The process produces a fluorescent signal that she will be able to detect under a microscope.

“The basic question is whether or not the chronic treatment of rats with alcohol changes the chemistry of the SCN,” Rosenwasser said. “And at the same time, I will be working with other undergraduate students in my laboratory to explore the effects of alcohol treatment on rats’ circadian behavior.”

In addition to her course work, Townsend brings experience from a summer internship at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. She worked with David Towle on a hormone thought to control the ability of shore crabs to adapt to changes in salinity, a process called osmo-regulation.

Next winter, she will give a poster presentation on the results of that research at the conference of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in Anaheim, Calif.