Indrani Das, a 17-year-old Indian-American teen from New Jersey won the top prize at America’s oldest and most prestigious high school science and math competition worth 2,50,000 US Dollars, the Regeneron Science Talent Search competition, which is known as the Junior Nobel Prize (12 of the people who won the contest have gone on to win actual Nobel Prizes).
Her project found a way of increasing the survival rate of neurons affected by injury or degenerative disease in the brain.
A contributor to neuron death is astrogliosis, a condition that occurs when cells called astrocytes react to injury by growing, dividing and reducing their uptake of glutamate, which in excess is toxic to neurons. In a laboratory model, she showed that exosomes isolated from astrocytes transfected with microRNA-124a both improved astrocyte uptake of glutamate and increased neuron survival.
Another Indian-American teen, Archana Verma, won fifth place in the competition, for her research on windows that could produce solar power.
