Tendon Tissue Team: Mareyna卡琳

家乡: 库斯湾，俄勒冈州

Mareyna’s Hands-On Experience is Made Possible Through:
National Institutes of 健康 (NIH) Grant – the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.

Mareyna的研究:
Tendon is primarily made of collagen. Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are enzymes that degrade collagen, 重建, heal and reinforce existing tissue.

通过处理胶原海绵, 所谓的支架, 与基质金属蛋白酶, Mareyna卡琳 is gathering data and trying to form conclusions on the number of MMPs present and their resulting degradation levels. Since MMPs are present during tendon development, it is thought that knowing more about how MMPs work to degrade collagen is an important step toward finding a tendon replacement.

MMPs are tightly regulated in the body, 卡琳 said.

“You don’t want your collagen to be degraded all the time,” 卡琳 said. “They need to be activated during very specific stages and then turned off when they’re done doing what they’re supposed to do.”

Activating the MMPs has been tricky, 卡琳 said. Some activator molecules can actually be toxic to cells.

卡琳 said she intends to do some mechanical load testing on these scaffolds to see if forces placed on the scaffolds cause any changes in the number of MMPs or if they become more or less activated. She hypothesizes mechanical loading may actually prevent some of the degradation caused by the MMPs.

Born in Lewiston, 卡琳 grew up in 库斯湾，俄勒冈州. She received the Uno and Vera Richter Memorial Scholarship, which is given to a Coos Bay high school student each year. That, combined with the affordability of U of I, made Idaho the perfect choice, 卡琳 said.

She grew up thinking she wanted to be a veterinarian, and her U of I undergraduate degree is in pre-veterinary.

“I always loved the combination of medicine and biology, 我一直很喜欢动物, so it seemed like a good way to go,”她说。.

That was until she found herself on her first engineering project. With some coaxing from her dad, 卡琳 applied for and received a NASA’s Undergraduate Student Instrument Project grant through the Idaho Space Grant Consortium. 卡琳’s team launched high-altitude balloons to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere to study human space habitability.

“I ended up loving it,”她说。. “I loved the whole engineering process and the combination of different disciplines.”