During the fall 2021 semester, I participated in an immersion experience working in the community to identify a global health problem. I spent my time volunteering in a “choice food pantry”, Serve City in Hamilton, OH. Throughout my experience, I had the opportunity to speak with many different members of the community as well as […]
C02: Development of a Universal Influenza Virus Vaccine
Influenza virus is a RNA virus that can cause yearly epidemics worldwide. This virus has also been known to cause many pandemics in human history. This independent literature research will ask and answer the question: Why is influenza still a major public health issue and what steps can be taken to prevent future influenza pandemics? […]
C09: Elucidating Interactions between Adenovirus and DNA- PK
For Adenovirus (Ad) to undergo a successful replication cycle, proteins expressed from the early gene region 4 (E4) function in regulating the host’s DNA damage response (DDR). In mutant viruses with a deletion of the E4 region (E4-), one particular DDR kinase — DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK)— is able to ligate the ends of Ad […]
C10: Determining How Activation of the DNA-Dependent Protein Kinase Impacts Adenovirus Replication
While human adenovirus (Ad) infection can cause severe illness, antiviral treatments often cause serious adverse effects and have limited efficacy against severe Ad infection. Ad infection activates the cellular DNA damage response (DDR), which triggers activation of protein complexes such as the DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK) that hinder viral infection. However, Ad wields several viral […]
C68: Isolating the FCRL1 and SHIP-1 Interaction Domain
A major component of adaptive immunity is B cells, which produce antibodies. Fc Receptor-like 1 (FCRL1) is a receptor protein on B cells that interacts with the protein SHIP-1, but the details of this interaction are not well understood. SHIP-1 has 3 important domains: SH2, phosphatase, and proline-rich region. We seek to determine more about […]
C04-P: Competition of Burr Oak Lake Complete Ammonia-oxidizers and Ammonia-oxidizing Archaea
An important step in the nitrogen cycle is the process called nitrification, which is performed by ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms (AOM): ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB), ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA), and complete ammonia oxidizers (comammox). The question being researched was “when AOA and comammox are placed in direct competition for ammonium, who outcompetes who?” Comammox were only discovered in 2015, […]
B30-P: Nutrients Deficiency in Lake Bonney
It is well known that microorganisms can have positive or negative interactions with each other in the natural environment. Our research area is about the relationship between microorganisms with the environment. Specifically, we investigated how Antarctic microorganisms living in ice-covered lakes are affected by nutrient limitation. We used the enrichment cultures collected from an ice-covered, […]
B32-P: MBI475: High Salinity Stress on Antarctic Microorganisms
The goal of this research was to study the impact of high salinity stress on enrichment cultures containing algae and heterotrophic bacteria from a lake located in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica. The research question – Does high salinity stress affect the phylogenetic diversity of microbial communities in a dry valley lake? – tested the […]
B29-P: MBI 475: An Adventure with Antarctic Enrichment Cultures in Extreme Shade
Lake Fryxell is a perennially ice-covered lake located in the McMurdo Dry Valley, Antarctica. Due to harsh conditions such as low temperature and light, its food web is composed entirely of microbes. In this project, the goal was to investigate the composition of Lake Fryxell’s microbial communities when placed under extreme shade as the abiotic […]
B33-P: The Effects of Heat Stress on an Antarctic Microbial Community
Our research involved enrichment culture samples collected from Lake Bonney in Antarctica. From these sample cultures our research group conducted two separate experiments: how does heat treatment affect the growth, physiology, and diversity of the microbial communities?, and are the isolated bacteria from these samples psychrophilic or psychrotolerant? For the first research project, OD600, countess, […]