Saving the Environment! (one plasmid at a time)
Hi! My name is Anna Ruth Halberstadt (a rising senior at Carolina Friends School) and I'll be attacking the world's pollution problems through Dr. Gunsch's Civil and Environmental Engineering lab this summer! Well, saving the environment is a bit of a lofty goal; more specifically, I'll be studying the degradation of toluene (a polluntant) by a community of bacteria. I'll be dealing with the transformation of plasmids from the donor bacteria P. putida (Psuedomonas putida), which contain the gene for toluene degradation, to the community. The bacteria will come from our waste water, called "active sludge". What an appetizing name... Anyway, I'm not allowed to handle the active slugde (safety reasons), but I'll watch as Ruoting spreads it onto petri dishes and then I'll get to work with the colonies that grow there. My project fits in with the lab's overall focus by studying the possible correlation between a colony's rate of toluene degradation and its average G/C content (amount of guanine-cytosine base pairs in its DNA).
My project will be similar to that of last year's Howard Hughes Precollege Program participant Annie Chen, who worked in the same lab last summer. (Annie's blog)
I'm so excited about this project- I'm interested in most sciences, and I think I want to be an engineer (since I love biology, perhaps biomedical engineering..?). Last summer, I went to nerd camp (a.k.a. Summer Ventures in Science and Mathematics at ECU) for about a month and concluded with an engineering project. I'm hoping to continue the theme of science and engineering with Howard Hughes. I love playing soccer and just got back from the Region III tournament in Georgia this weekend! I'll be leaving soon (as soon as Howard Hughes ends...) to go to Costa Rica with my family until January. I'm going to start senior year at a school there! I'm so scared...
Enough about myself for now... I'll update as soon as more exciting things happen!
Peace out ; )
AR
