Clinton Morgan and Derek Mitchell
Receiving an ORCA allowed me the time and means to learn how to do research. I personally only receive a portion of the award, so I will report what I personally have done. The most that I accomplished can be seen less in the results of my research and more in me. I have gained many wonderful skills and experiences through doing this research. These include research skills as well as working with a mentor.
My research with DNA repair mechanisms in bacteria involved many different things. I had to read many articles about what else had been done in the field and what lab methods others had used that I could use to optimize my research. This taught me how to find journals in the library as well as online. It also helped me to know how to read complicated scientific journals and find the information I needed. I also was able to find out a lot about these repair genes in bacterial cells.
Working with a mentor was another skill I obtained. I did not used to be able to approach professors and ask them questions and work with them. Now I am not afraid to do so and that has enriched my learning experience. I also learned how to work under expectations of a higher authority. My professor was always asking what I had accomplished the past week and I had to have something to report.
Microbiology lab techniques were another skill I obtained. I learned how to do the Polymerase Chain Reaction. Running the reaction is one thing, but optimizing it so the results are what you want is another thing. One thing I spent a lot of time doing was designing RNA primers that would work the way I wanted them to. Many reactions failed since the primers were not specific enough.
I started out trying to amplify a UV repair gene from a bacterium. Other researchers had done it before, so I decided to use it for my experiment. I spent a semester working in the lab trying to get the gene to work, but to no avail. My mentor and I came to the conclusion that the primers were bad. We decided to choose a new gene that is similar and design our own primers to that. I spent another semester researching articles to plan out the experiment and choose the gene we wanted to work with. We needed a gene that is applicable to the research as well as found in many different organisms. We decided to take the research another direction and work with the recA gene.
I spent even more time finding sequences of the gene on databases. We wanted to find enough similar sequences of the gene to common soil microbes. Using such sequences, we could align them, find the similar parts, and design PCR primers to them. Then I put the sequences in a primer designing program on the computer. It was very frustrating since I could not find an optimal set of primers to this gene that would work on most soil microbes.
We finally ordered some primers that should work and we have them in the lab. We also were able to obtain some DNA extracted from the soil at various locations. These locations are at different altitudes allowing us to compare the DNA repair of organisms at different amounts of UV light. If this works, then we could also try it on DNA from other places like Antarctica. However, this is as far as I have got and I am graduating. Hopefully, I will be able to pass on what I have done to another student who can finish it.