Cricket research project another step on senior’s road to biostatistics career

by Chuck Gordon

La-Nay Distin remembers clearly the genesis of her fascination with science and the natural world. As a young girl, Distin spent a lot of time outdoors in her native Jamaica, finding tiny creatures to do "research" on.

"I was always outside playing with insects and worms, with my fake surgical table, cutting them up," she says. "That's where my love for science started - wondering why things are happening this way, why they are mimicking the things we do, stuff like that."

This summer, Distin had a full-circle moment - well, many of them - when she did the bulk of a Reeves Summer Research project with associate biology professor Dr. Acchia Albury.

House crickets' flight muscles are essentially vestigial, which means they are leftover traits from a previous evolutionary stage, like wings on an ostrich or goosebumps in humans. They break down a few days after the insects reach adulthood in order to preserve resources for something else, most likely reproduction. By the fourth day after maturation, the muscles are essentially gone.

"In short, muscles are expensive, and if you don't have to maintain them, you can maintain something else - evolutionary trade-offs," Albury says.

Albury has learned over the years that when the flight muscles break down, white blood cells come in to clean up the debris. This is a key component of programmed cell death, but which white blood cells are involved in this process? Distin has been actively investigating the cellular-debris cleanup to find out, and this summer that meant reverting to her childhood love of experimenting on insects.

Distin's job this summer was to inject flight-muscle cells from different phases of crickets' lives into other crickets and then observe their immune response. Using proteins from the healthy muscles of Day 1 crickets (those who matured into adults up to 24 hours earlier) and proteins from the dead muscles of Day 3 crickets, she examined under a microscope how the white blood cells of mature crickets (Day 6) responded.

Distin discovered at Wingate that she really loves math - "Dr. Albury got on me one time for working out the data by hand when I can just put it in Excel," she says - and she's enjoyed crunching the numbers from her summer research this fall to confirm her and Albury's expectations. Next week, she will present her findings at the prestigious Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Scientists in Pittsburgh.

Developing independence in the lab

Albury has been experimenting on crickets since her undergraduate days. Crickets are relatively cheap - Albury can get 1,000 of them for about $30 - and easy to acquire. They're also perfect for studying muscle degeneration.

Distin is the latest in a long line of students to study cricket muscles under Albury's watchful eye. Distin says she couldn't have asked for a better mentor.

"I like the way Dr. Albury runs her lab," she says. "She lets you make mistakes. She gives you room to figure things out and helps when you ask. She lets you bring up your questions. She's not behind you telling you, 'You need to do this' or 'You need to do that.'

"Figuring it out on your own gives you a sense of independence, which I feel will really prepare me for graduate school, when I find myself in similar types of labs."

"La-Nay is self-motivated," Albury says. "She has that intrinsic motivation to understand that she's the person driving this project, and I am more like the guardrails to keep her on track. She shows up, she does what she's supposed to do, and when she has questions, she's mature enough to come and ask as opposed to going down the wrong path."

It's been a long, busy road for Distin to get to this point. She hasn't been home to Montego Bay since first stepping foot on the Wingate campus in August of 2021 intent on becoming a dentist. She rarely slows down: If she's not studying, researching in the lab or serving as a biology-lab assistant, she's working at Bulldog Central or at summer Orientation.

To top it off, it took her a couple of years to figure out that she didn't want to be a dentist after all - she wanted to be a math major. By then it was too late to change majors without requiring additional semesters, so she settled on earning a biology degree and having a math minor.

With that decided, she started hunting for a career path that would blend the two. She landed on biostatistics, and her goal is to be a lead biostatistician in a pharmaceutical lab.

Distin says that Dr. Laora Brizendine, professor of mathematics, and Dr. Debra Davis, associate professor of biology and Distin's advisor, were instrumental in helping her figure out her career path in the face of uncertainty.

"In trying to change, you feel like something is wrong, but it isn't actually wrong," she says. "You're just trying to figure it out. And now is the time to figure it out. Having people around who are helping you make that choice has been helpful."

With the clock ticking on her undergraduate career, Distin doesn't have time for senioritis. After presenting her research in Pittsburgh, she'll polish off her grad-school applications, which are due by Dec. 1, while working on a manuscript for potential publication in a peer-reviewed journal in the spring.

With two stints working on Albury's crickets under her belt, her resume will be attractive. And she'll come highly recommended.

"La-Nay is a quick study," Albury says. "She has gone through the process of delving into the literature, figuring out what's out there, developing a hypothesis, creating her own experimental design, and then learning the tangible skills to actually go about doing research.

"The idea here is that research itself enhances critical-thinking skills. And then more importantly, when you're thinking about the transition from undergraduate school to graduate school, it's the idea of being able to formulate your own questions, and then ultimately designing a research experiment that will be able to answer those questions."

Distin, Albury says, has shown the grit and motivation needed to do just that.

Nov. 5, 2024

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.