Summer 2020 Remote Research

This summer, I worked on my project “Investigating the pollution-driven evolution and genetic variation of ARNT in PAH tolerant populations of Atlantic killifish” with my mentors Tom Schultz and Jason Somarelli. I started this project last fall, and with the support of the Undergraduate Research Support Office, I have been able to make tremendous progress with the project. Through the past fall and spring, I generated data in a lab setting, and I sent the samples to be processed. This summer, as a continuation of the project, I worked collaboratively with a team of undergraduates to clean, filter, and sort the raw data that I generated. This process was extremely new and challenging for me, and the book that my mentor Tom suggested called “Practical Computing for Biologists” which was included in my URS Remote Summer Grant has helped me develop my computational biology skills and learn more about the application of computer science into biology and medicine. After we filtered the data, our team aligned several thousand sequences using a variety of powerful tools and computing power such as Codon Code Aligner and Genius, which are computer programs that the URS grant helped to fund. I will be able to continue to use my account in each of these programs to continue to complete my project. Now, this fall, I am preparing posters to present at conferences, and our team is in the process of writing a manuscript to submit to a research journal. In the spring, I will write my senior thesis on this project and continue the research. I am extremely grateful to the URS office for being so accommodating and supportive of my research experience, and I have learned so much from this experience this summer.