I'm really not sure exactly what's going to be going on yet because I will be assigned a mentor and need to get my budget, so I can plan our what supplies I need, animals I will need, etc, and submit a formal proposal, get IUCAC approval, etc.
I'd really like to have an end goal that applies to both humans and animals. I've seen a lot of studies with mice and "glycosylated end-products" aka "glycotoxins" which are produced in food by processing/heating etc. Like the Maillard reaction in burnign toast, that kind of thing. Mice on low diets had longer lifespans, less insulin resistance, better kidney function and kidney histology, lowered gene markers of inflammation (rAGE genes specifically...), lowered inflammatory cytokines, etc...as compared to mice fed a highly processed, i.e. high glycosylated end-product diet.
So that suggests that you can control mediators of inflammation in the body via diet. These studies were in normal mice. I'd like to take some special mice predisposed to, say, arthritis, or even lupus mice. Try the diets on them and see if nutrition can actually lower inflammation in animals that aren't healthy and *have* chronic conditions.
The implications could be more targeted nutritional therapy for arthritis, asthma, chronic kidney problems, obesity (which has a LOT of inflammation problems) or allergies in people as well as animals - and also better monitoring of these conditions via inflammatory gene expression products. If I get the mentor I want, he is doing a study on inflammatory markers in obese horses, so if I could have a sideline project running with his, doing a nutritional study with them would be awesome. I've never done horse research before
OOhh radiology. Probly my toughest subject, but I have a lot of respect for it - it's so interesting, I just wish I was better at it!
