Behavioral analysis and protein folding in zebrafish larvae

The zebrafish, Danio rerio, is a very important vertebrate model organism with growing popularity in biology and neuroscience. My thesis work covered two topics centered on zebrafish. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 focused on the swimming behavior of the animal. This topic is of great interest because animal behavior is the direct reflection of neural activity. In particular, because of the episodic nature of the swimming behavior of larval zebrafish, the quantitative analysis of its behavior presents potential in bridging behavior and underlying neural control. In Chapter 1, I looked into the escape response behavior in 2D. Combining an objective behavior analysis approach with a simple neurokinematic model, I was able to explain the difference between two types of escape response behavior by the difference in their corresponding neural circuits. The results from my non-invasive analysis agreed with previous findings in invasive electrophysiological studies, in contradiction with some unconstrained swimming studies. In Chapter 2, I extended the swimming behavior analysis into three dimensions. I developed a physical model-based tracking algorithm that captured both fish position and shape in 3D during swim bouts. I analyzed the swimming behavior in a 3D environment and compared with the behavior in 2D. My results showed a distinction between the behavior in 2D and 3D environments and this distinction revealed that past studies in 2D may not faithfully capture the behavioral repertoire of larval zebrafish in the natural environment. In Chapter 3, still using zebrafish as the model organism, I studied protein folding dynamics in differentiated tissues in a living organism. With CPLC postdoc Caitlin Davis, I developed a customized pipeline that integrates meganuclease-mediated mosaic transformation with fluorescence-detected temperature-jump microscopy to probe dynamics and stability of endogenously expressed proteins in different tissues of living zebrafish.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Chemistry

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2020

Author dc:creator

• Feng, Ruopei

Contributors dc:contributor

• Gruebele, Martin
• Chemla, Yann R
• Nelson, Mark E
• Lu, Yi

• zebrafish
• danio rerio
• behavior
• protein folding

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2019 Ruopei Feng

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106446

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/106446