Exciting New Articles and Theses Presentations!

Hello! I have been looking at a research paper with the graduate student I work with in the lab for the past few weeks. This research paper is all about how the differences in race and eye color may affect the suppression of melatonin levels by light. There have been studies previous to this one which showed that in  patients with seasonal affective disorder, the darker-eyed patients have been significantly more depressed and fatigued than the lighter-eyed patients. There have also been previous studies that suggest Asian people's melatonin levels are less affected by light than Caucasians. I found this so interesting!!!! So I jumped at the chance when Brittany told me we could look into this phenomenon further! We looked at a study that was on the influence of eye colors of Caucasians and Asians on suppression of melatonin levels. Their results showed that in fact, the previous studies were correct; the percentage of suppression of melatonin secretion was significantly larger in light-eyed Caucasians than in dark-eyed Asians. So these results show that eye pigmentation and/or ethnicity affect how much your melatonin levels will be suppressed by light! I'm a dark-eyed Caucasian, so I wonder how my melatonin levels are affected differently!
Also, today I saw a presentation of the two graduation students' theses in the lab! It was so interesting because they are not finished with there theses yet so they got lots of feedback form my mentor and other professors and scientists. Brittany, the graduate student I work with most often, showed the data that I have been discussing about light from phones, computers, and TVs. The other graduate student, Anna, discussed an experiment on the efforts to put LED lights (blue-white lights) in the rooms of patients with Alzheimer's. She did this because more exposure to light during the day would help these patients sleep through the night and not wander at night (which is a common problem with these patients). This would help the caregivers as well as the patients. They are still working on the experiment because it was difficult to expose the patients to a lot of light when they were not in their rooms where the LED lights were installed. It was a very professional presentation and the audience had a lot of smart, specific feedback for the students. One piece of feedback for Anna was to put the LED lights in different places in the room so that the light covers more space. To see what life as a student in the lab as well as life as a scientists there was really interesting. It was a definite highlight of my time at this internship!