Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello!
I was planning on doing my project on something related to autism, sodium/potassium channels and seizures. The article I found that I wanted to relate my project to talked about how genetic variants in sodium channels cause autism and when overactive they cause seizures. But the medicine given to close the sodium channels and prevent this sometimes doesn’t work for sodium channels with a deficiency. Which causes potassium channels to over compensate for the deficient sodium channels, shutting down more potassium channels and actually causing seizures. Here is the article:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 184744.htm

My teacher suggested I do something with gene therapy and genetics, since using gene therapy the article said they wanted to try and create personalized medicine. So, I was thinking of doing something like that and my teacher gave me gene databases to look at but they are very confusing. Do you have any suggestions on where I should start/ what should I start looking at if I wanted to do a project related to this? And what type of things should I be looking at for the genes related to this?
Thank you so much!

Hello,

This sounds like a really interesting topic for a project! The first step in using gene therapy to re-open potassium channels would be figuring out which genes you would have to target. To find this out, you can use research paper databases like Google Scholar and Pubmed to research which genes/proteins are necessary for potassium channels to function normally. Here's one paper that might help you get started.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4811893/

Now, the question is: what direction do you want to take your project from here? Unless you have access to a professional research lab at a university or private company, you probably won't be able to do any gene editing experiments yourself. But, you might be able to do a Bioinformatics project that's completely online. One idea would be to research one of the proteins involved in potassium channel functions and figure out if a drug targeting that protein might have off target effects. This is a really important factor to consider when designing a new drug since you don't want it to have unintentional side effects. Here's the link to the Science Buddies project on this topic.
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... cy#summary

I'm also linking all of the projects Science Buddies has on Genetics and Genomics. You can look through those to see if they give you any inspiration for your own project.
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... nomics?p=1

I hope this helps you get started planning your project. Don't hesitate to post any more questions that you have in this thread!

Thank you so much for this information it has really helped me start planning my project! I really appreciate it thank you!