Week 20

I took a pathway that I know pretty well, NMDA-based long term potentiation (the process by which neurons become more sensitive to neurotransmitters in response to glutamatergic activity). I made some positives for both the first part of the pathway, the channel proteins that bind to and Ca2+ associated proteins, and the last part of the pathway, which involves nuclear proteins involved with transcribing growth factors and new channel proteins.

A protein centrally implicated in LTP, CaMKII, was used as the reference ranked 21 out of ~15,000. It’s good, but it could be improved. It might be better if we allowed for more precision.

Upcoming tasks will include further verifications, but will probably be postponed, since both of us are taking the biology junior qualifying exam, which is a cumulative exam that we need to pass to graduate.