I am currently a biology major at George
Mason, and hope to matriculate into the accelerated nursing program at Mason in
fall 2017. I am interested in bioinformatics and have a new interest in data
sciences research. I’m interested in developing my bioinformatics research
skills, for this knowledge to transfer to my future career in nursing: I
believe that nursing is not well utilizing the data sciences, and that there is
a wonderful opportunity for nurses to use large data sets (big data) to improve
patient care. As an undergraduate, I’m looking forward to develop my bench
skills (biology research) and computational skills. I’m also really interested
in bacteriophages. Mycobacteriophage are perhaps a cutting edge resource for
medicine today, and seem to be useful for treating bacterial infections
therapeutically. My OSCAR project is conducted with OSCAR applicant Jennifer
Jones.
On a weekly basis, my colleague and I perform
the procedures outlined in our proposals. At the beginning of the semester, we
began ordering supplies and materials needed as well as conducting workbench
organization. Primers were ordered in preparation for performing PCR after
extracting the DNA from our mycobacteriophage. We were able to obtain control
mycobacteriophages from a JMU collaborator a week ago, in order to test our
ordered primers. However this week, my colleague and I made the mistake of
placing our control mycobacteriophages in the deep freezer. This can destroy
the mycobacteriophage organisms in the samples. We have taken them out and are
now conducting the standard amplification procedures to help us identify if our
mycobacteriophage are still viable or not. If mycobacteriophages are found, with
the infection of mycobacterium smegmatis, we can continue performing PCR and
testing the validity of our primers. If not, then we will have to wait another
week for another order of control phages.
