Centre staff
Dr Caroline Dalton
Senior lecturer in biomedical science
Phone 0114 225 3695
Email c.f.dalton@shu.ac.uk
Research interests
Neuroscience
Pharmacogenetics
Study of functional polymorphisms in the family of 5-HT receptor genes. These polymorphisms may affect gene expression in certain groups of psychiatric patients and therefore affect their response to drug treatment. The current study is focussed on genotyping patients for the various polymorphisms, and relating the genotypes to mRNA and protein expression using real-time PCR, binding assays and reporter gene assays in mammalian cell lines.
This work is in collaboration with Dr Adrian Hall and is part of a long-standing association with Professor Gavin Reynolds of Queen's University, Belfast.
Neurodegeneration
This work has focussed on the developed a cell culture model of CAG repeat diseases, which can be used to study the mechanisms of these disease, in particular the differences in vulnerability of affected neuronal cells to mitochondrial toxins. This has been applied to the investigation of the effect of polyunsaturated fatty acids and antioxidants on neurodegeneration in neuroblastoma cells.
Further studies are concentrating on investigating the potential neuroprotective effects of selenium. This work is in collaboration with Dr Philip Gardiner.
Recent publications
Reynolds LM, Dalton CF and Reynolds GP (2001) Phospholipid fatty acids and neurotoxicity in human neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells. Neurosci. Lett. 309: 193-196.
PhD students
- Hanan Bokhamada - Investigation of proinflammatory and anti-inflammatory biomarkers in diabetes and heart disease
