My (first) research project is to attempt to have two different types of Halobacterium salinarum with different properties mate. Working with the NRC-1 strain, I will learn a lot about how frequently mating may occur under certain conditions and also, how feasible it is to mate two knockouts to create a double-knockout. What’s interesting about these little halophiles is that despite the name, they are not bacteria, they are archaea, which means that conjugation isn’t some regular thing that happens and they just exchange plasmids. As a matter of fact, different species of halos have recently been shown to exchange DNA with each other which calls into question the scientific definition of a species(this sort of “interspecies” interaction also occurs in bacteria).
This ties into the grand scheme of things in that my lab is all about H. salinarum. If I could potentially create a double-knockout, that could aid others in their research. My future research projects may view mating in a different light and go about the process in a different way, thus giving different types of results. Although it is still a little ambiguous at the moment, I am excited to see what kind of results my first experiment will yield by the end of the week.
