Daniel Meza is a second year Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology major at UCLA. The Shah lab uses C. elegans as a model organism to study the mechanisms that drive the neural circuits that form during development. Daniel is currently investigating the efficacy of various iterations of GCaMP, a genetically encoded calcium indicator, for use in embryonic C. elegans. With newer versions of GCaMP being recently developed, their time to protein maturation in C. elegans is unknown. Because the development of C. elegans is on the scale of hours, slight improvements in the time needed to have a functional GCaMP can be very significant. Through microinjections, Daniel produces transgenic C. elegans containing the desired GCaMP for testing.