International internships expand perspectives

International internships expand perspectives

BY SHAWN HUTCHINS
Special to the Rice News

Rice bioengineering graduate students Jim Kretlow and Jennifer Greeson are gaining new insights into research and education by working on internships in world-class laboratories in Mexico and China.

JIM KRETLOW	JENNIFER GREESON

Their opportunities, which were funded by the President’s International Collaboration Travel Fund, are part of an initiative to advance Rice’s Vision for the Second Century. The program is managed by Carol Quillen, vice provost for academic affairs, and fosters new and long-term relations between the university and leading universities in Asia and Latin America.

The international internship programs helps graduate students fulfill their internship requirement and exposes them to the leading research and academic culture of another country.

Since May 2007, Kretlow, a student in the Rice/Baylor Medical Scientist Training Program, has been working in collaboration with Antonios Mikos, the John W. Cox professor of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Yilin Cao, director of the Tissue Engineering Center at the Ninth People’s Hospital in Shanghai, China. He has been investigating the effect of donor animal age and cell passage on the ability of bone marrow stem cells to differentiate into fat, cartilage and bone tissue.

Cao established the first tissue-engineering center in Shanghai, which has gained an international reputation in the field. A major focus of the center involves the clinical application of tissue-engineered bone.

“The opportunity is showing me focus areas of the lab I’m working in,” Kretlow wrote in an e-mail. “Our lab at Rice specializes in the biomaterials aspect of tissue engineering, while the lab here specializes in the cellular aspect. Both are important, but require very different areas of expertise, so this is a pretty natural collaboration.”

Greeson, a graduate student in Rob Raphael’s Membrane and Auditory Bioengineering Group, worked last summer with Jorge Arreola at the Universidad Autonoma (UASLP), San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Rafael is the T.N. Law Assistant Professor in Bioengineering.

Arreola, a biophysicist at UASLP’s Physics Institute and leader in the electrophysiological properties of chloride channels, trained Greeson in whole-cell patch-clamp recording techniques. Greeson also studied the effects of membrane-tension altering compounds on the action of volume-sensitive chloride channels.

Greeson made the exciting discovery that chlorpromazine, a lipophilic drug, specifically blocks these channels. This work opened a new line of research for Arreola’s lab that may shed light on the channel’s elusive gating mechanism.

“I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn patch-clamping in Dr. Arreola’s lab,”
 Greeson said. “Patch clamping is an essential tool for auditory research, and his group does it very well.”