My Project blah blah blah
In this modern day and age, environmental issues are only becoming more and more pertinent. Everyone in the labs around me (including the lab Eileen is working in- Eileen's blog) have dedicated their careers to attacking these colossal problems bit by bit. My lab (Dr. Gunsch's lab) is mostly working specifically with the degradation of one of many pollutants, toluene. The goal is to artificially alter environmental conditions in order to break down pollutants like toluene most efficiently. Our logical first step would be to find out under which climates bacterial colonies best degrade toluene, which is what my project focuses on. I'm looking at one specific chemical characteristic, G/C content (percent of DNA consisting of guanine-cytosine base pairs) to see if it affects a bacterial colony's ability to degrade toluene; i.e. take up the plasmid containing a gene that codes for proteins catalyzing toluene deterioration.
The project has two distinct steps; first measure G/C content, and then measure the rate of transformation of the toluene-degrading plasmid. Since I'm still in the incipient stages (despite having just finished the third week of this program!), I'm about halfway through the DNA isolations of each bacterial colony I selected. Since the amount guanine and cytosine nucleotides helps determine at what temperature the DNA strands separate, I can determine relative G/C content by mapping the derivative of each sample's DNA melting curve (dissociation curve) in the qPCR machine. That's about how far I've gotten!
