This summer Sarah and Nene are participating in the X-Sig Summer Research Program sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

This is week 1 for Nene. She is our resident pulse field gel expert, and her main task this summer is to isolate and characterize plasmids from environmental bacterial samples. She's just getting ramped up, but over the coming weeks she will assist the with the testing of the replication run-off model by analyzing double strand break generation with PFG.  

Sarah is wrapping up week 3 and has made a lot of progress. This summer, her main goal is to test a model that implicates the Escherichia coli replication fork in  the generation of double strand breaks following quinolone treatment. If I lost you in that last sentence, don't worry - next week Sarah will explain her project in more detail.

In addition to testing the replication run-off model, Sarah is helping with the biofilm project that Amanda Finck started last year. Last Tuesday (June 14th), emeritus professor Sherman Hendrix came to campus to teach us how to use the Scanning Electron Microscope. After our SEM crash course, Sarah began troubleshooting the fix & dehydration protocol, trying to make it biofilm-friendly. We had quite a bit of fun with equipment that we don't get to use everyday.