My name is Rachel Haley, I am a sophomore double-majoring in
Chemistry and Microbiology. I am currently researching the fungal microbes of
microbial communities at shipwreck sites in the Gulf of Mexico. The primary goal of my research is to
establish that fungi are present at these shipwreck sites and identify the
phylotypes of these fungi.
I am interested in studying the specific fungi, identifying
the microbes that populate the communities at the shipwrecks, and how my
research fits in and contributes to the greater project that is the focus of my
lab. I work for Dr. Leila Hamdan and Dr. Jennifer Salerno in their lab at
George Mason’s Prince William campus. The lab is working with BOEM on SCHEMA:
shipwreck corrosion, hydrocarbon exposure, microbiology, and archaeology. This
project studies whether shipwreck sites act as artificial reefs, island theory
of biogeography, and the effect of the 2010 oil spill on the microbial
communities-their composition, metabolic functions, and relative abundance. My
research will contribute novel information regarding fungal groups and expands
on previous research with respect to both bacteria and archaea.
In May of this year I joined Dr. Hamdan and other members of
our lab and several colleagues from the Naval Research Institute on the R/V
Pelican for a week of collecting samples in the Gulf of Mexico. Since returning,
I have worked with Dr. Hamdan in the lab at Prince William, performing DNA
extractions and working with bioinformatics pipelines to analyze the DNA
sequences of samples collected during the previous sample collection in 2015.
