THE BIO.LOGICAL

My first exposure to college-level research was through the SEA PHAGES (Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science) program as a freshman! It was a program aimed at integrating a more hands-on approach to learning lab skills that would go beyond the cookie-cutter procedures. In the Fall term, everyone started off with isolating a single bacteriophage population from a soil sample that we went out and collected. Once the population had been isolated and grown for collection, some of the students' specimens were sent out for sequencing ( I was one of them, yay). It wasn't until the results were sent back at the beginning of the Winter term, that I realized I had a mixed population. And so, my sample was placed on hold while the others' sequences were used for bioinformatics analysis that term to determine gene functionality and integrity within the samples.  During the Spring term, we were all given the opportunity to work on our own individual research projects! This gave me a chance to work on separating my two bacteriophages, BobaPhett and JangoPhett, from each other by designing specific primers that would reveal cluster-specific genes in the sequences. Unfortunately, as an amateur primer designer and given the limited amount of time I had to work on the project, I wasn't able to specifically identify any cluster-specific genes by the end. Overall though, I genuinely enjoyed the whole investigative process that this research experience entailed and is what really sparked my interests in pursuing research!