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Stonehill Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) Summer 2022 Projects

Forty Stonehill College students will work with twenty-one faculty members on a variety of research projects during the summer of 2022, the twenty-sixth year of the Stonehill Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. SURE provides students with an opportunity to perform significant, publishable research under the guidance of an experienced faculty researcher. The research experience gives students a competitive advantage in graduate and professional school applications and in post-college employment opportunities, as well as to offer assistance to faculty in research activities.

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Maeve Clifford, ’23 will work with Greg Maniero, Associate Professor of Biology, on the on-going project CD4 as an ancestral receptor for the cytokine IL-16; evidence from the from Xenopus laevis. CD4 is a protein found on immune cells of all vertebrates, including humans. Cell that have CD4 on their surface are the master regulators of the immune response that is responsible for protecting organisms from disease. Although all vertebrates produce CD4, the protein varies considerably between distantly-related organisms. All of the varieties of CD4, in addition to their other functions, act as a receptor for the soluble immune factor IL-16. We have demonstrated that human IL-16 will activate CD4 cells from the frog. We are continuing to describe the effects of both human and frog IL-16 on frog immune cells. Our results will provide important and novel information about the evolution of the vertebrate immune system. We have reported results from previous SURE projects in three publications and hope to generate enough results to submit another paper to the journal, Developmental and Comparative Anatomy, and to present our work at international conferences in comparative immunology in 2023.