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– Presented by Tezin Walji, Chelsea Walker, Erin Luippold, Shannon McCartha
Tezin, Chelsea, Erin, and Shannon have successfully annotated part of the Drosophila erecta genome. In other words, their data has been added to a database with the Gene Expression Programming (GEP), and they have annotated 53,000 base pairs of DNA.
Many biology student, here at Agnes Scott are pretty familiar with the Drosophila fruit fly, but the group choose the species because it has a short life cycle and easy maintenance. WIth computer programs and a lot of hard work, they used a process of labeling genes sequences as introns and exons. After they passed all of the checks, their data is was to the database and available for other scientists to use. In the future, another group of students will get a new gene to sequence.
This talk was especially interesting to me to see how much work four people had to put in to sequence one chunk of the fruit flies DNA. Research like what Tezin, Chelsea, Erin, and Shannon have done at Agnes is the type of scientific research that can lead to an understanding of the genetic behavior in the animal kingdom including humans. Great job!
Lora-Beth