Alexandra Bennion completed a remote summer research project through the Duke Comparative Oncology Group mentored by Dr. Jason Somarelli. She learned how to create gene networks and use bioinformatic data to highlight potential genes of interest and drug targets.
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Hi Alexandra! I found your comparative oncology experiment to be very cool. I was wondering how your experiences have shaped your opinions on the reasoning behind Peto’s Paradox? Do you think that the phenomenon is that larger species (such as whales) have lower relative rates of cancer despite their size (due to other confounding factors such as hypoxia tolerance), or rather, that species that are large enough have mechanisms to combat cancer (by virtue of their size)?
Hi Alexandra! Your research this summer seems really fascinating. What did most of your work look like? Do you plan on following up with any of your conclusions with wet lab research?
And more specific to your Methods section, how did you identify which genes were highly expressed? Did you analyze sequences of each species’ genome for instances of TREM1 or did you evaluate the proteome to determine whether the genes were actually expressed or not?
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