Hello everyone. My name is Isabelle Massaro and like Antolette, I am fortunate to be one of the local California State University, San Marcos (CSUSM) students accepted into the NFS REU Research Program this summer. I am a senior here at CSUSM (with only 1 more semester left!) and am majoring in Molecular and Cellular Biology with a minor in Chemistry. As I near the end of my bachelor's degree, I plan to continue my education to pursue my passion in plant biology research. Since I joined Dr. Escobar's molecular plant biology lab, I have gained hands-on experience working with plants. My project in the Escobar lab focuses on working with the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, to help characterize class III glutaredoxins (GRXs) and identify their role in plant growth and development. GRXs are small oxidoreductase enzymes that reduce disulfide bonds in target proteins. The interesting thing about class III GRXs, is that they are exclusively found in land plants, but most remain functionally uncharacterized. To help identify the biological function of these genes, we have created different transgenic plant lines that either overproduce class III glutaredoxins, or have knockout mutations in class III glutaredoxin genes. For instance, this summer I have been growing two knockout lines that have five GRX genes (AtGRXS3/4/5/7/8) inactivated and two overexpression lines that constitutively overexpresses AtGRXS8. We previously found that this cluster of class III GRXs are significantly upregulated by nitrogen in the soil, specifically in the form of nitrate. This is important because nitrogen is essential for plant growth and development and without nitrogen, plants can not produce DNA, RNA, proteins, or chlorophyll. This summer, my main focus has been on extracting RNA from hydroponically grown transgenic plants with the end goal of sequencing the whole transcriptome using Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS). This will help identify how our GRXs influence patterns of gene expression in plants provided with nitrate as a nitrogen source. The start of the summer involved lots of tissue grinding, RNA extractions, gels for quality control, and cDNA synthesis. This week was especially exciting because we were finally able to start performing Real-Time PCR runs on all of the samples. From these results, we can identify differences in gene expression between our transgenic lines and the wildtype for some specific nitrate transporter genes in roots and shoot growth genes. These results will also help us identify the best samples to send for RNA sequencing. In addition to the molecular work that I have been doing, we have also been growing lots of plants on soil for phenotyping. This allows us to better understand how GRXs affect overall plant growth. For instance, our overexpression plants have significantly smaller shoots compared to the wildtype, which is why we hypothesize that these GRXs genes are negative regulators for shoot growth. As for phenotyping, I have been tracking flower production, weighing total shoot biomass, and imaging pavement cells. And within the next couple of weeks, we plan to complete total nitrate and protein content analyses to better understand how efficiently our transgenic plants store and utilize nitrogen. Overall this allows us to help characterize these class III GRXs and their role in plant growth and development. At the end of the week, we were finally able to go tide pooling! Low tide this summer has been a little tricky to plan around, since it was always very early in the morning. That did not deter us though, and a group of us got up at 4:00 AM to venture out to the coast. We ending up going to Sunset Cliffs National Park and it was well worth waking up so early. This was probably one of the best tide pooling experiences I have had. We found so many neat creatures that I have never seen before. Immediately when we got there, we found an octopus hiding within the algae, which was a great start to our early tide pool adventure. After that, we also found an eel, a lobster, a beautiful red Hopkins’ rose nudibranch, a delicate brittle star, and a ginormous sea hare. And there were so many crabs, shrimps, and little isopods scurrying everywhere. I am very grateful to be a part of such an incredible cohort this year. This summer has definitely been an amazing experience and I want to thank Dr. Sethuraman and Dr. Read for running an excellent program during these challenging times. Good luck with everyone's research project as we come to the home stretch.
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Hello all! My name is Sandy Lastor (a.k.a San). I am an uprising junior at Bay Path University in Longmeadow Massachusetts. I, along with many of my colleagues, am majoring in biotechnology. I cannot express how extremely grateful I am to have the chance to travel across the country to be a part of such a wonderful program, such as the 2021 NSF REU summer program. This summer I am a part of Dennis Kolosov's lab, where fun becomes an understatement! My six weeks being here has been such a blast. I have been able to learn new skills I never pictured myself working towards. I have met such beautiful souls that will forever mark a special place in my heart. In the lab more specifically, we are studying the epithelial physiology of caterpillars. I am inspecting the caterpillars means of secretion (i.e urination.) A great comparison would be the human kidney. This helps us learn about the organism and how much of a pest problem caterpillars really are to the economy. Caterpillars cost the U.S.A the equivalent to Argentina's yearly income in crop infestation (470 billion.) Our goal in short would be to decrease crop infestation and how we can reach our goal. In order to study the kidney of said caterpillars, multiple rounds of troubleshooting has taken place. This week my partner and I have been dissecting multiple caterpillars in order to increase our speed to produce results in a more rapid fashion (more caterpillar tubules, more results.) With that in mind, our use for the dissection is to separate the cells into principle cells and secondary cells in order to see what exactly we are dealing with. Elastase is used as an enzyme to separate the tubules into their designated groups (principle/secondary.) Later, a percoll density gradient is used to separate principle cells from secondary cells. In addition to the separation, staining is used to differential viable cells from dead cells as well as principle from secondary. Outside of the lab, tons of fun activities take place as well! I would like to say my lab and I go to the beach habitually and eat yummy foods during the week! Being here for the time I have been here I have learned so much about the west coast! I also had the chance to visit the San Diego Safari and explore all kinds of animal habitats! Carlsbad State Beach San Diego Safari Yummy foods! Lab work I cannot express how fortunate I am to work in a brilliant lab and be a part of an amazing cohort of scientists! This summer is definitely one to remember.
Hello everyone! I’m Antolette Kasler. I’m a senior at California State University San Marcos majoring in Biological Sciences with a concentration in Cellular and Molecular Biology. I’m very grateful to be part of the NSF funded REU Program at CSUSM for 2021. I’m part of the Jameson Lab where we determine the role of immune cells in wound repair in type 2 diabetes and the autoimmune disease Alopecia areata. I’m in the Alopecia areata team where we look at genes that could be a possible therapeutic target for patients with Alopecia areata.
I joined Dr. Jameson’s lab spring of last year. Since then, I’ve learned how to analyze data samples of bulk RNA sequences using Galaxy, analyze data using Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) and looking at RNA sequences in the single-cell level using R programming. Due to the pandemic, most of the research work I did for Jameson Lab was virtual. I was very excited to finally be back in lab to learn hands-on work for our research this summer! Though it has only been 5 weeks, I have learned so much already. I have been trained to stain epidermal skin and look and view my prepared samples under the immunofluorescence microscope. I’ve started my very first cell line (Yay!), been trained to use Cytek’s Flow Cytometer, and many more skills that I can add to my toolbox that I will be able to use in the future. In addition, I had the honor along with a fellow summer scholar, Albert, to escort President Neufeldt in Science Hall 1 to show her the different research labs in our building. I was very impressed with how much she genuinely cares about everyone’s research. I also was able to talk with her about the importance of research lab opportunities and experiences for students. I emphasized not only the great work that could potentially impact other people’s lives but also the amount of knowledge that I will bring with me long after I move on with my educational goals. I’m very lucky to be a part of the Jameson Lab and I could not ask for a better PI and lab mates. Dr. Jameson truly cares about each of us and always pushes us to be better researchers. She helps us think in a way where we fully understand our research and the purpose of everything that we do. I’m also very fond of all my lab mates. Since most of us were out of the lab due to the pandemic, we have been there for each other to guide and help each other to train and navigate around the lab. We are a team and we are a family in the Jameson Lab. Lastly, I’m very glad to have met everyone in the 2021 REU cohort this year. It’s very nice to meet brilliant researchers from different universities and get to know each of their reasons behind their passion in research. We are halfway through our summer research program, but we still have a lot of science learn and a lot of fun to experience! Hello! My name is Haven Johansen (they/them/theirs). I am a rising senior at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA (go Vikings), where I study Biology and am creating a second major in Reproductive Health. I am thrilled to be part of the 2021 REU Summer Scholar cohort at CSUSM. I’m writing to you from the Becket Lab, which is a microbial genomics/ecology lab focused on the spread of antibiotic resistance (AR) in coastal microbiomes. Most of my time is spent assisting Ciara Sanders -- a graduate student in our lab -- with her thesis, which examines the rate of horizontal gene transfer of AR elements in coastal microbiomes in response to variables that will shift with the changing climate. My fellow REU labmate Lakme and I collect, filter, and bullet (preserve) seawater samples three times a week; Ciara uses these bullets in an assay she is working on, and later Lakme and I will use some of the bullets to establish community profiles of our samples through 16s rRNA sequencing. We hope that these samples, in addition to the metadata we collect each sampling day, will create a useful baseline for Ciara and for future projects in the Becket Lab; because the coastal microbiome is so complex and variable, it is helpful to ground experiments by getting to know the communities we're working with and the conditions that surround them. This week we sampled and filtered our seawater, collected metadata, helped Ciara with her assay, delved into the bioinformatics platform we’ll use to analyze our samples, learned to isolate DNA using a DNA/RNA miniprep kit, learned to use the lab’s Qubit, and plated and cultured E. coli in an antibiotic to compare growth between two stocks and to practice sterile lab techniques. The lab’s new sequencer was delivered and its arrival was met with much fanfare. We also attended several excellent lectures and observed other protocols performed in the lab. I’ve learned that by staying observant, asking lots of questions, and carrying a notebook everywhere, I absorb a huge amount of new information in the lab every day. I feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by so many experts and up-and-coming scientists in this field who are passionate about their work and ingest (nearly) as much coffee on a daily basis as I do. This week was also full of post-lab mischief. We hiked Double Peak, toured White Labs, stopped by the farmer’s market, and skated at Balboa Park. This has been an excellent experience and I look forward to our remaining six weeks in the program. I love science! |
Watch this space for weekly updates!Every week, one of our CSUSM NSF REU students will post their blurb, summarizing their week, and chronicling our program. AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
August 2023
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