Over the summer, Sarah Park, a senior majoring in integrative neuroscience, participated in a project with twelve other SUNY students to improve scientists’ understanding of the human brain.

Park worked as part of the state-run Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) program, an initiative promoted by President Obama. The program was created with the goal of mapping all the neurons in the human brain to gain an understanding of how the mind, body and environment interact.

After receiving a department email that sparked her interest, Park said the program seemed to be a good fit for her.

“They wanted people who were really enthusiastic and interested in research,” she explained.

Patricia Di Lorenzo, a Binghamton University psychology professor, was in charge of the research. Her lab worked to examine how taste preferences in rats varied when offered real food instead of chemical solutions usually used in taste studies.

“We used real food for the research because it’s way more effective to apply to real world understandings of how taste works,” Park said.

Rats were offered food representations of the five different taste groups: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami, a savory taste. Substances like grape juice were used for sweetness, coffee for bitterness and clam juice for saltiness.

According to Di Lorenzo, the rats’ neurons were more stimulated by real foods, and the affinities each animal had for the tastes were determined by the amount of times they licked each one.

The information gained from the experiment will help lay the foundation for understanding why patients can experience a change in taste preference after gastric bypass surgery.

In the future, the rats in Di Lorenzo’s lab will be compared to rats who have undergone gastric bypass surgery to study the changes in taste preference. With this information, doctors can then research how gastric bypass surgery can be used to alter a person’s diet preferences.

After her experience, Park said she wanted to go to medical school to become a doctor and continue to do research.

“It definitely gave me new appreciation for research,” Park said. “But I also realized how important it is to work with people, a lot of people on a daily basis.”

The National Institutes of Health reports that the BRAIN initiative is meant to explore and understand the basic structure of the brain so that medical professionals can improve their abilities to address health issues.

“Every medical advance that there is, you can name anything, has always been built on been based on basic research,” Di Lorenzo said. “If you want to cure diseases then you need to fund people who do research on basic questions. That’s the only way you could hope to advance treatment methods.”