I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.- Andrew Wyeth
The Spring is upon us... It's time for IBH interviews! Open houses will be on Feb 7 and 12; Interviews are at the end of the month. Check the FAQ page for more details!. Sign up now!
Meanwhile, current students are great people to ask about the program, and of course, anyone is always welcome to contact the IBHonors advisors to get started (link in the menu to the left).
Spring also means the season for setting up summer jobs. Despite your seemingly overwhelming schedules, or perhaps before the proverbial 'it' all breaks loose again, it is a very good time to start thinking about this. Check the revised and updated Jobs page, and don't miss the Spring Careers Workshops.
Where Are We Now continues the series on what IB Honors students are doing in their Independent Study time. This time, the focus is on Steve Gutzmer and his project with the Fire Service Institute.
RNA interference, or RNAi, is a mechanism to degrade double stranded RNA. Evolutionarily it serves as an antiviral mechanism (against viruses containing dsRNA), but in recent years it has become a powerful tool for the molecular geneticist. It is so new, in fact, that there are still no rock bands named RNAi or siRNA, or even songs about it.
It is also so new that biology laboratory courses incorporating it are rare. At Illinois, only one course (IB270), open only to sophomores in the IB Honors Biology program, offers that experience.
Each year, Professor Charles Whitfield finishes the semester by assigning a "Discovery Project". Students, working in groups, are required to develop a hypothesis concerning gene function in C. elegans, transform E. coli with a plasmid for the dsRNA complementary to the gene, and infect their worms with the bacteria to, in effect, knock out the function of the worm gene. The project is made more interesting by the requirement that the gene not have been targeted before.
In the end, each group prepares the results for presentation to the class and to previous classes of IB Honors students, as though they were presenting at a scientific meeting.
This year, there were four projects. Although the number of reps possible in the short time available clouded the statistical significance of some of the results, the overall experience was unique and valuable.
The first group targeted mechanisms for heavy metal tolerance, in particular Cadmium, used the worm genome database to find a candidate gene (cdr-4), and then challenge wild-type and cdr-4 mutants with varying concentrations of Cd. Within a few hours, the number of RNAi worms surviving (e.g. 15 mM Cd) was substantially lower than the number of wild-type survivors.
The second group went after a thermosensor, beginning with a gene (gon-2) analogous to a well characterized gene from Drosophila. They used RNAi knockdown to study the ability of the worms to "thermotaxize" (I think they made this word up), or move along a thermal gradient to an optimal temperature. One clear outcome of that study was that just making the gear to do the experiment is challenging in itself, even if the mutation went well.
Group 3 also paid attention to the movement of the worms, but in this case, in the importance of the trp-2 gene and its interaction with caffeine. Others (published studies) had looked at the relationship between trp-2 and nicotine, but with Illinois restaurants and bars going smoke free this year, and with coffee shops doing better by the week, the different approach was clearly critical. It turns out that worms with functioning trp-2 decreased their movements, while the knockouts increased their speed on plates containing caffeine. Students and professors alike took this to heart.
Finally, the last group investigated a worm equivalent of squamous cell carcinoma, the second most common type of skin cancer in humans. They compared protein sequences through NCBI BLAST, and found a worm protein very similar to a SCC antigen, coded by the srp-7 gene. The role of srp-7 otherwise is not well understood. They tested the hypothesis that trp-7 is important for the immune response to UV-radiation, and the results may actually have been positive.
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