Sarah Lindstrom
Graduate Student
Department of Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior
Division of Biological Sciences
1107 Life Sciences Addition (LSA)
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, California 95616
Phone: (530) 752-1816
Fax: (530) 752-5582
Sarah is a graduate student working towards earning a Ph.D. in the Neuroscience Graduate Group at UC Davis. Before deciding to study the retina as a neuroscientist, she was an aspiring marine biologist. She earned a B.S. in Psychobiology at Southampton College, a small college on Long Island, New York. She spent a year working in the Physiology Graduate Group at UC Davis hoping to do comparative studies of the visual system of stingrays. But, transferred into the Neuroscience program after rotating in the Wilson Lab, where she realized that she really wanted to study the retina. She recently finished the required course work for the program and is enjoying being able to work in the lab full-time.
Current Project
Sarah is currently working on two distinct projects. She is collaborating with Sal and Ajith to identify the current associated with the Ca2+ Blips that Sal has been studying. To accomplish this goal, Sarah and Ajith work together to obtain simultaneous patch-clamp recordings and Ca2+-images from a single neuron. However, most of her attention is focused on a project which seeks to understand the role of the centrifugal visual system (CVS). The chicken CVS consists of a large feedback projection from the brain to the retina. Since this projection makes up about 1% of the axons in the optic nerve, it is probably playing an important role in visual processing in the retina. She plans to use a number of scientific techniques (including multi-electrode arrays, fluorescent tracing techniques, and immunohistochemistry) to determine how the CVS modifies activity within the retina.
Recent Work
Sarah has used immunocytochemistry to determine whether starburst amacrine cells are present in the lab’s cultures from chick retina. Unfortunately, she was only able to highlight the need for testing antibodies on retinal sections first. The antibodies she was using to detect cells that produce or release acetylcholine (ACh) stained non-specifically in chick retinal sections. This proved that just because some of our antibodies work in rat or mouse tissue, does not mean they will work correctly in chick.
