Neal is featured in the latest “Honours Profile” of The Argosy

Neal Callaghan has been featured in the latest “Honours Profile” instalment of The Argosy, Mount Allison University’s student publication. Congratulations on this recognition!

The article is currently available online here: http://www.argosy.ca/article/honours-profile-neal-callaghan Alternatively, a PDF version can be viewed here.

Note: regrettably, while Neal certainly deserves every bit of the attention (and more), the article itself has some errors (both factual and writing mistakes) and omissions. Please take note of the corrections below.

1st and 3rd paragraphs: Nowhere in this article is the nature of Christopher Dieni’s position specified (in contrast to “biochemistry professor Tyson MacCormack” in the 2nd paragraph). Dieni is the Margaret and Wallace McCain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He is a member of the full-time unit of the Mount Allison Faculty Association (MAFA).

2nd paragraph: The article states that Callaghan has been supervised by MacCormack for two years. Callaghan was supervised by MacCormack as a Carnegie summer research scholar during Summer 2012. Callaghan was then supervised by Dieni during his tenure of the Goodridge Summer Undergraduate Award (summer 2013), and again by Dieni for his undergraduate honours research thesis (Fall 2013-present). Essentially, Callaghan has been supervised by Dieni from May 2013 to present. The misconception may arise from the fact that all this research has been done in the MacCormack Lab.

3rd paragraph: “enzume” = enzyme.

6th paragraph: The tank into which white suckers are placed is not a feeding tank. In fact, fish are not fed the day before or during an experiment (Dieni CA, Callaghan NI, Gormley PT, Butler KMA, MacCormack TJ. Physiological hepatic response to zinc oxide nanoparticle exposure in the white sucker, Catostomus commersonii. Submitted to Comp Biochem Physiol Toxicol Pharmacol ID# ms.23214).

7th paragraph: “insoluable” = insoluble. Additionally, while nanoparticles cannot be dissolved per se, they can be suspended in aqueous solution (depending on their component materials and surface functionalization), and will remain in suspension for protracted periods of time before ultimately sedimenting.

8th paragraph: Understandably, this is a very short, “lay” (for lack of a better term) article, but the phrase “Preliminary results of Callaghan’s research is showing that most aren’t affected […]” can be somewhat misleading regarding the greater ramifications of our research. 60% of the 10 fish exposed to zinc oxide nanoparticles showed no significant changes for this particular marker, the kinetic parameters of white muscle lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) assessed; that still means that 40% did indeed exhibit some response to nanoparticle exposure- again, within the context of LDH kinetic parameters. Previous research (Dieni CA, Callaghan NI, Gormley PT, Butler KMA, MacCormack TJ. Physiological hepatic response to zinc oxide nanoparticle exposure in the white sucker, Catostomus commersonii. Submitted to Comp Biochem Physiol Toxicol Pharmacol ID# ms.23214) has shown that other markers of stress in other tissues can give a much more pronounced indication that most fish respond to zinc oxide nanoparticle exposure.