Jessica Kahng is a rising senior, majoring in Biology and minoring in Neuroscience at Bryn Mawr College. There she works in the Greif Lab, researching the role of the calcium-sensor protein, synaptotagmin-1, in terms of axonal branching during development. As an Amgen Scholar at UCLA, Jessica is working in the laboratory of Dr. Samantha Butler and under the mentorship of Sandy Alvarez. She is researching the guidance factor, netrin1, and its role in commissural axons growth during spinal cord development in chicken and mouse embryos. The Butler Lab’s previous research established a novel model for netrin1 in which netrin1 derived from the ventricular zone is responsible for guiding commissural neurons ventrally to and across the midline during development. In addition, this model proposes that netrin1 works in a local manner through haptotaxis, or growth directed along an adhesive surface, with netrin1 working as an adhesive guidance cue. Netrin1 has continued to be researched in the lab, and recent findings have indicated the possibility of netrin1 existing in various cleaved forms, or isoforms, in the spinal cord during development; an existence that has not been documented previously. Jessica’s project therefore focuses on identifying and characterizing netrin1 isoforms in the developing spinal cord of chicken and mice by dissecting out spinal cords from various embryonic stages and processing them using Western Blot Analysis. Jessica would like to thank the members of the Butler Laboratory for their guidance and the Amgen Foundation for providing such an invaluable research opportunity.