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Microbial Evolution

undergraduate researcher in Microbial Ecology and Evolution Lab,

      MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Cambridge, MA
January-May 2017
protocol: tag bacteria with BrdU, expose them to grazers, extracte gazers' DNA, isolate BrdU with magnetic beads
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At the heart of the marine environment, bacteria incorporate nutrient-rich, dissolved organic matter, which enters the food web when bacteria are grazed on by eukaryotic microbes. To identify which bacteria are preyed upon by which grazers, I spent the winter and spring of my freshman year helping develop a protocol for tracing BrdU, an analog of  thymine, up the food chain.

Preparing an agarose gel to see the resu
I performed gel electrophoresis, PCR, and flow cytometry
labeled sample amplified more than unlabeled sample, suggesting successful protocol 
Microbe Plot.jpg

I helped my supervisor catalogue and extract samples he collected in Antarctic  to test how desalination by ice melting affects microbial communities. I made this video about our lab:

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