Hi everyone!!!! My name is Maya Qaddourah and I am currently going into my 3rd year as a Biochemistry major here at CSUSM! My goal at the moment is to enter an MD program, hopefully somewhere in California, to eventually pursue plastic surgery/dermatology.
I have the pleasure to be working in Dr. Jane Kim’s lab, which is focused on tetranucleotide repeats, specifically CCTG nucleotides, and exploring the molecular mechanisms that may cause Myotonic Dystrophy type 2. I am currently investigating the role of Mismatch Repair (MMR) on CCTG repeat instability. I work together with my lab partner Janelle, who is also an REU student (look forward to her blog post, she has week 9!) MMR has its own set of proteins that work together to recognize small base-base mismatches, Msh2 and Msh6, and larger secondary structures, Msh2 and Msh3. Using the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as the model organism, repeat lengths were monitored via Polymerase Chain Reactions to investigate the role of the MMR genes and their contribution to DNA repair on these CCTG repeats. We investigated the role of the DNA repair genes by knocking one out to see its effect on instability frequency. We started our week off by completing a fluctuation assay, which was able to give us the mutation rate of these contractions. We streaked 72 plates, which was not easy at all TT. My lab partner and I still had fun! We set them in the incubator to be able to count them after 72 hours. We use yeast as our model organism as it is easily manipulatable and cost-effective. My favorite part of the day is when I open the incubator to grab my projects and suddenly the lab smells like a bakery due to the yeast! Really makes me want bread….. As our week went on, we had the pleasure of visiting a few labs on the UCSD campus! We met so many awesome people and were able to tour some amazing labs. I was happy as we were able to walk into the UCSD School of Medicine, which is actually my dream school! I was really excited to see it in person and it did not disappoint. We also went down to Escondido Creek to collect some samples from the water. It was my first time visiting the creek and I was so happy to see all the nature and running water. It was so beautiful to see, especially first thing in the morning. In my free time, you will probably never catch me alone as I am always hanging out with my best friend Ileen! We do everything together like grocery shopping, working out, to watching tv. We like to go out and spend money (even though we're both broke) but that's what makes spending money even more fun. Overall, I have had so much fun in this program and I have learned more in these few weeks than I have in certain semesters! I am excited about what is yet to come in this program!
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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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