Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello, this is my first year in my school’s Science Research class, and I have chosen to do the Science Buddies project “Drugs & Genetics: Why Do Some People Respond Differently Than Others?” for science fair. After looking through the project and doing my background research focused on the drug Carbamazepine, I am worried that the data is not sufficient for my project. I am unsure of what research question I would be answering since all the information I am collecting is already known. Right now I have “How do specific gene mutations affect a person’s response to Carbamazepine?” If there’s any way you could help me figure out a better research question or adjust the type of data that I’m collecting, I would be incredibly grateful! Like I said, this is my first year, and I don’t know what my data section entirely needs. I also don’t know what I would write in my conclusion section because I don’t know what the data is supporting or how to answer the research question since it has already been answered before.

-Brooklyn

Hi Brooklyn and welcome to Scibuddies.

I took a look at the drugs and genetics project on Scibud and I see what you mean about lacking a hypothesis to test. The project can give you experience in using these important pharmacogenetic databases, but as you said, what can you do to actually ask a question and answer it by digging up appropriate genetic data from the dbase?

I took a quick look on PubMed for 'gene mutations carbamazepine' and found an interesting article on the pharmacodynamics of carbamazepine (CBZ) in children:

https://pubmed-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.ezproxy ... /28064419/

Unfortunately, this is a pay-for-view article, but I might be able to get it through my university.

The idea I had was for you to determine how CBZ is cleared from the body. This will involve some PubMed searching and reading on your part to understand the pharmacokinetics of the drug, but I can help you by answering questions. My hypothesis would be that certain mutations that affect clearance could affect the responsiveness to CBZ. Once you found out which enzymes were involved in CBZ clearance, you would then have to search the pharmacogenetic dbases to see if any of the mutations are present and if they correlate with the child's responsiveness to the drug. If there are no genetic data on the clearance pathway, then you would have to choose some other aspect of the drug, like its effect on the brain in preventing seizures.

Let me know what you think of this idea. Maybe some other expert could come up with an alternative way to mine the dbases for info to answer a hypothesis, but this is all I can think of. A scientist who was interested in the genetics of epilepsy would probably do something like this to try and find gene/protein targets for drug treatment, so I think it is a valid experimental strategy.

Good luck!

Scibee