July 22, 2018
By: Christine Adjangba
In my experience, it’s not often you meet someone who works with poop regularly. So when I learned that Dr. Lawrence David studied the microbiome using human stool samples, I was immediately intrigued. But it wasn’t Dr. David’s research that...
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By: Sweta Kafle
While all of the presenters were great, I connected to Dr. Lawrence David’s talk the most. It wasn’t the overview of his science that drew me in, it was his call to be okay in discomfort (and even seek it)....
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By: Tamanna Srivastava
In the past couple of weeks, we have had a lot of amazing, accomplished speakers, all at different points in their careers, come talk to us about life and science. Each talk has been fascinating, with a new life story...
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July 17, 2018
By: Sweta Kafle
Plant development is influenced by the environment around it, and in Arabidopsis thaliana, these extra organismal development factors can be transmitted across generations. While it is known that both ancestral and offspring environment impacts development, the magnitude to which each...
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July 15, 2018
By: Dang Nguyen
Abnormal and excessive tau phosphorylation commonly characterizes Alzheimer's disease (AD) neuropathology through neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) causing axonal dysfunction and microtubular instability. Essential to DNA repair, protein modification, and gene expression, the methionine cycle generates a methyl group upon the conversion...
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By: Claire Engstrom
A majority of Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy cases are caused by a frameshift mutation in the DMD gene and the deletion of exon 51 with CRISPR-Cas9 can restore the reading frame in many patients. However, there are thousands of gRNA sequences...
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By: Felix Steinruecke
The ABL family of non-receptor tyrosine kinases, ABL1 and ABL2, are upregulated in non-small cell lung cancer and promote lung cancer metastasis. Recent work has shown that ABL kinases promote lung cancer brain metastasis and colonization. Global transcriptome analysis of targets...
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By: Michael Wen
Sea urchin embryos show a great affinity to replace cells necessary for normal development through a process called transfating in which cells in the embryo express genes of other cells to compensate for the removal. Specifically, the removal of primary...
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By: Michael Williams
Cannabis is one of the most popular drugs consumed in the United States. While work has been done to quantify whole genome transgenerational effects of cannabis exposure, there has been little done to quantify transgenerational effects on a gene-by-gene basis....
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By: Lillian Needam
How does the ability to do phagocytosis of a new cell population compare to other dendritic cells? The intestines are home to immune system cells whose role is to monitor the microbiota within the gut; one group of these cells...
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By: Adaora Nwosu
Dystonia is a neuromuscular disorder in which muscles make involuntary contractions, leading to abnormal and often times repetitive movements. It has been found that a common mechanism for several types of dystonia—each characterized by the gene adversely affected—was an impairment...
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By: Luke Sang
So far during my summer of research there have a combinations of highs and lows. Leading up to now, much of my research has been spent in trying to troubleshoot the issues with my project and trying countless different approaches...
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By: Melissa White
In Drosophila melanogaster, the genes Fruitless (Fru) and Doublesex (Dsx) control sex specific sexual behavior and experience-dependent sexual behavior, respectively. Additionally, mutants of the male form of Fruitless (FruM) and flies in isolation show a lapse in sexual behavior, indicating that experience has effects...
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By: Julia Marshall
I'm happy to say in the past few weeks I've made some progress with my project. While the beginning was a pit rocky, after a few rounds of optimization and discovering we were using a faulty antibody results have started...
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By: Alina Xiao
Mice are such wonderful creatures to work with. Those that I habituate every day have become so nice to me. But there are also those who vocalize enough to make you think yes it's gonna work and then stop...
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By: Christine Adjangba
To start off this post, I just want to say how surprised I was yesterday when I thought about how there are only 2 weeks left until BSURF ends. On Friday I performed my last RIA for the summer, and...
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By: Simeon Holmes
Cryptococcus deneoformans is an opportunistic human fungal pathogen that mainly infects immunocompromised patients, including AIDs patients and patients with organ transplants. It infects approximately 280 thousand people and contributes to about 180 thousand deaths per year. Few strategies are available in...
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By: Michelle Lee
Progress on my project has unfortunately been quite slow, due mostly to unavoidable issues that cropped up earlier into the process. In particular, the change from using FL green sea urchins to NC green sea urchins. Given that the project...
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