Tina

Tina

Yutian (Tina)
Brookline High School 
Brookline, MA 

Mentors:
Nicole Rockweiler, Yang Xu & Alec Wysoker 
Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research | McCarroll Lab
 

Tina was on a mission to learn about anything and everything related to biomedical research to benefit those around her. In her application, she said, "As an aspiring scientist, I hope I can use the skills and connections I build through this program to conduct research that helps everyone to get the care they need."  While at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Tina and her partner, Bryan, explored schizophrenia (SZ), a complex and chronic mental disorder. While the direct causes of SZ remain unknown, researchers at the Broad Institute have recently begun to investigate the role of somatic mutations in the disease. Somatic mutations, which arise after fertilization, were recently implicated in SZ. Tina investigated the burden of somatic mutations  SZ versus control donors using a program called SComatic to call somatic mutations from single-nucleus RNA-seq. According to her analysis, sComatic detected 92 somatic mutations in chromosome 21. However, the mutational burden between control donors and SZ was not statistically significant in the aggregate brain nor in individual cell types such glutamatergic neurons, oligodendrocytes, GABAergic neurons, astrocytes, microglia or polydendrocytes. Future work will focus on inspecting the mutational burden between SZ and controls of the remaining human genome. By the end of BSSP, Tina had built a vast network of colleagues and a whole new skillset in the arena of computational science that will serve her moving forward in the world of science. She added “BSSP taught me that I can be a scientific researcher, and there are so many mentors who are here to help me grow and succeed.”
 

September 2023