Q&A with Christine Muheim
Published August 7, 2023, by Judith Van Dongen
For postdoctoral research associate Christine Muheim, becoming a scientist wasn’t so much a predetermined path as it was an instinctive journey to follow her interests as they developed. This ultimately led her to the lab of WSU neuroscientist and College of Medicine faculty member Marcos Frank, where she has been working on basic science studies on the ties between sleep, learning, and plasticity since 2017.
What type of research do you do?
I’m interested in knowing how sleep helps learning and plasticity in the brain. Plasticity is the brain’s ability to adapt to changes in the environment. I want to know how this works in adults and young children. We know that children’s brains are meant to be more plastic at certain ages. These very sensitive time windows are when specific learning processes need to happen, such as the development of vision, language, and motor skills. What I want to know is how sleep alters communications between neurons in the brain in a way that makes us learn better and adapt better to changes in our environment across development and adulthood.
Why is this an important topic to study?
Sleep is such an essential part of our everyday lives. Everyone needs it, and we spend a third of our lives sleeping. It’s important to understand why we are the way we are, which is the first step toward understanding what happens when things are not the way they are supposed to be, such as in people with sleep disorders or other conditions that cause poor sleep. We also know that children sleep very differently than we do. Our society still thinks that children should follow our sleep schedule and needs. Sleep scientists have meanwhile accumulated a lot of evidence showing that a child’s brain is very different than an adult brain, and that might be for a good reason. Our recent study in mice has shown that there is a clearly defined window of time during development when changes in sleep can change circuits in the networks involved in learning processes and affect them quite drastically, which you can’t do at other times.
What has your research found so far?
We are mainly working in the brain’s visual cortex, which is a system that we can easily access and work with. Scientists have largely looked at the visual cortex at the population level, meaning that they recorded and looked at an entire cortical area. We have very little understanding of how different cell types and individual neurons within a cell type contribute to sleep-dependent brain plasticity. One thing that our research found is that individual cells within the same cell population can do very different things. This suggests that massing them all together will probably not help us understand. Our ultimate goal is to figure out what poor sleep does to plasticity so we can perhaps do something to help us learn better even when we sleep less.
What led you to become a sleep scientist?
I completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology at the University of Zürich in Switzerland. As part of my master’s program, I did a year of rotations in different types of laboratories. One of those rotations was in the lab of Steve Brown, a scientist who studied the circadian clock, the brain’s built-in 24-hour rhythm that keeps us on a day/night cycle. He asked if I wanted to join the lab, and I completed a PhD in neuroscience under his mentorship. As a long-time circadian biologist, Steve wanted to get more into the sleep field at the time and came up with a project that I worked on. It involved looking into what shapes brain waves seen in an electroencephalogram (EEG), a commonly used tool in sleep research that measures the electrical activity of the brain. From there, I started to read about sleep and plasticity. What little work had been done in that area had been pioneered by Marcos Frank. When I finally met Marcos at a conference, he was looking for a postdoc, and it seemed like a perfect fit for me.
What are some projects you are currently working on?
I have collected a lot of data on different cell types in the brain that look at how plastic they are when given a specific learning task. I’m currently analyzing all that data and trying to understand how this all flows together. We just recently published a very interesting study in which we looked at how the absence of sleep at younger ages affects changes at the gene level. We’re also interested in looking at changes at the protein level. There is this assumption that when something changes at the gene level it changes the proteins produced by those genes in the same way, but that might not always be true. In collaboration with College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences researcher Bhagwat Prasad, who runs a proteomics lab, we have been doing experiments to look at protein-level changes in a plastic brain as compared to a brain that is not plastic or that has been sleep deprived.
How has working at WSU advanced your career as a researcher?
Coming to WSU has helped me broaden my horizon and build a network of connections. And being part of a smaller campus meant I wore different hats, which has allowed me to learn more skills than somewhere where roles may be more specialized. Having that broad skill set helps me to better understand how other scientists come to their conclusions and results.
Is there anyone who has been instrumental to your research journey so far?
I’ve had two mentors who are very much responsible for who I am today. One is my late graduate supervisor Steve Brown, who saw qualities in me that I couldn’t yet see and who sparked an interest in me that was just amazing. The other is my current supervisor Marcos Frank, who has allowed me the flexibility to really follow my interests.
What do you like to do when you are not in the lab?
I enjoy gardening quite a bit. I love to grow serrano peppers and chilies and use them to make hot sauce. I can’t actually eat hot sauce, but I enjoy the process. It’s very similar to work in the lab in that it allows me to test different techniques, but with a lot more freedom to play around and experiment.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.