Lakeland University students Tegan Schneider and Mitchel Larsen presented their research at the 50th annual Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in Chicago in October.(Photo: Jered McGivern)

SHEBOYGAN - The woman's skin sample had already been "tricked" to think it was an embryo. The job for two Lakeland University biochemistry students was to make it behave like brain tissue.

Tegan Schneider, of Plymouth, and Mitchel Larsen, of Sheboygan, teamed up for this unusual task during Lakeland's summer research program, hoping to better understand how the brain regulates neurotransmitters.

Now juniors, they continued their work this semester and recently presented their research at the 50th annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.

The sample they worked with came from the Medical College of Wisconsin and had already been directed, using chemicals, to behave like fetal tissue.

To get the sample to think it was brain tissue, Schneider and Larsen added growth factors that those cells would normally see during developmentin the brain.

The purpose of making brain cells in a dish, from skin cells: Donated brain tissue is hard to come by, said Jered McGivern, an assistant professor of biochemistry at Lakeland, who helped them with their research.

"There's a lot of work being done in the medical field to use (this method) for developing treatments and cures," McGivern said.

McGivern said Schneider and Larsen did a great job of trying different techniques to study neurotransmitters with the instrumentation they had, and they did a lot of work outside of the summer program because they were so interested.

One of the biggest challenges was to keep their cells from getting contaminated, sincethey don't have an immune system.

Theresearch is good experience for them to have as they move into bigger labs, McGivern said.

Suzette Rosas didthe foundational work and is now a graduate student at the Medical College of Wisconsin, he added.

McGivern joined Schneider and Larsen at the meeting in Chicago, which was attended by over 27,000 people, and where the students got to learn about work being done in the field.

Schneider and Larsenwere able to attend the meeting because of a gift from 1969 Lakeland graduate Cliff Feldmann.

Contact Diana Dombrowski at ddombrowski@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @domdomdiana

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After 'tricking' skin cells to behave like brain tissue, Lakeland students present at neuroscience megaconference - Sheboygan Press