The brain is the most important organ in the body, being our command center and controlling everything from memory and movement to basics like the beating of your heart and breathing, deserves its own week of recognition.
Brain Awareness Week 2025, going on during the week of March 10-16, is the global campaign to foster public enthusiasm and support for brain science. In a Clemson News article written by our own senior genetics major Brooke Dillingham, assistant professor of genetics Dr. Tara Doucet-O’Hare and her research was featured.
Tara Doucet-O’Hare is an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics and Biochemistry and a member of the Clemson Center for Human Genetics. She studies dysfunctional chromatin remodeling’s impact on endogenous retrovirus expression and neural development by looking at how this incorporated DNA can lead to different cancers when mutated, such as clear cell meningioma and atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumors in the brain.
“These tumors tend to affect really young children. There are no targeted treatment options currently, and it’s hard enough for an adult to live through all of those things, let alone a young child,” she said.
Doucet-O’Hare has recently worked with a retroviral protein called an envelope protein, which is expressed on the membrane of cells and exported in extracellular vesicles. When mutations occur in the chromatin remodeling proteins, the envelop gene can be expressed when it’s supposed to be turned off, resulting in cancerous cells. This protein is more prevalent in cancerous brain cells.
“I showed if you knock out this protein in tumor cells, then you could essentially stop them from dividing so quickly and kill them,” Doucet-O’Hare said.
She and her colleagues at the National Institutes of Health have recently found a peptide that targets the envelope protein and is starting a pre-clinical trial with the National Cancer Institute and a neurosurgeon at the University of Miami to test its use as medicine.
Endogenous retroviruses were first discovered in chickens in the 1960s, leading Doucet-O’Hare to us chicken embryos in her research, obtained from the Clemson poultry farm, to model the migration of cells throughout development and to investigate the endogenous retrovirus life cycle since chickens develop similarly to humans.
The chicken embryo model also comes into use for the connection between retroviral proteins and chromatin remodeling. She looks at which mutations lead to tumors and how different mutations impact tumor location, cell origin and size.
Doucet-O’Hare plans to experiment with exposing the embryos to different carcinogens like BPA in plastics to see the downstream consequences on development in the future.
Read more in the Clemson News article.
