Nathan Bryant
BS, General Biology, Middle Tennessee State University

Student Profile:
Nathan Bryant is a basic scientist with an expertise in molecular biology. He received his BS in General Biology, with a concentration in Microbiology, from Middle Tennessee State University in 1999. He worked for three years as a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Biology before enrolling in the IDP program at the University of Florida. Nathan originally focused his research efforts on structural studies of viral vectors for gene transfer. Nathan joined the NMPT program in his third year and his current research is focused on implementing Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy to monitor disease progression in muscular dystrophies. Nathan has completed his qualifying exams and is in the process of preparing to submit his thesis dissertation proposal. Nathan is co-mentored by Drs. Glenn Walter and Krista Vandenborne.

Research Project Description:
Nathan is monitoring damage and repair of skeletal muscle in animal models of muscular dystrophy, using noninvasive imaging techniques; predominantly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Using different methods of imaging the muscle tissue, he is interested in following disease progression and assessing the effectiveness of putative treatment strategies for different forms of muscular dystrophy. He works with two form of dystrophy, a severe x-linked form Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) and a less common form, Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophy (LGMD). He has mouse models of both types. A mouse strain called mdx serves as a model of DMD and he has alpha and gamma sarcoglycan knock out mice that serve as a model for LGMD. He uses MRI as a noninvasive tool to assess different types of damage and repair that occur during the progression of the disease. In order to assess these pathological changes, he is requireded to utilize several modalities of MRI. Specifically, the use of T2 weighted imaging to measure acute muscle fiber damage that often occurs in dystrophic muscle due to a genetic mutation that leads to the loss of stability of the muscle fiber’s plasma membrane, the sarcolemma. Secondly, he is using diffusion weighted MRI to observe structural changes in the muscle during repair and recovery from damage and is interested in the mircostructural modifications that the skeletal muscle under goes during a chronically damaged disease such as muscular dystrophy. Another approach to using MRI in his work is to attempt to measure amounts of scar tissue and fibrosis to accumulates over time by looking at changes in magnetization transfer contrast in young and aged (fibrotic) dystrophic mice. In the future, Nathan would also like to develop targeted contrast particle system, which will label areas of therapeutic gene expression in MR images during pre-clinical therapeutic trials in these murine models of muscular dystrophy. Nathan utilizes new promising therapeutic interventions to determine the sensitivity of MR methodology. Ultimately, the objective of his work is to provide a reliable noninvasive readout of muscle damage, which can be implemented in clinical trials of muscular dystrophy.

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