Project Description: 

Nitric oxide gas commonly occurs in soil atmosphere, due to biological activities of soil microbes or plant roots. Nitric oxide can also regulate many intra-cellular processes in a microbial cell, including the regulation of gene transcription.

The advance of next generation sequencing offers a wide selection of new research tools to study microorganisms; enabling scientists to easily and accurately identify their phylogeny and metabolic capacity. By sequencing microbial RNA transcripts at a certain time point, with advanced of next generation sequencing, the genes that are expressed then can be evaluated. The goal of this project is to identify the genes that are expressed under exposure to NO by soil microorganisms.

To this end, different soil isolates were inoculated on sand grains and exposed to NO with a novel NO application system. Inoculated sand grains were flash frozen in order to preserve the most accurate state of transcripts occurring in the cell. RNA will ultimately extracted from inoculated sand and sequenced.

Department: 
ESPM
Undergraduate's Role: 

The Undergraduate student roles in this project:

  1. Maintain microbial cultures for ongoing experiments.
  2. Help extract RNA from inoculated sand grains
Undergraduate's Qualifications: 

 

  1. Basic knowledge in microbiology
  2. Close attention to details
  3. The following courses are a plus: 

                   a. Microbiology

                   b. Molecular biology

                   c. Soil sciences 

Location: 
On Campus
Hours: 
To be negotiated