Hello and welcome back! I hope everyone enjoyed their Spring Break.
I spent my break coming up with a new Senior Project experiment as my last one had to be completely scrapped. It was a stressful and enlightening experience to the reality of research because I learned that a single mistake can lead to an entire project’s failure regardless of the amount to work or research that went into it beforehand. I also realized that being overly ambitious can be a problem but if you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big (just be prepared for failure).
As I was trying to come up with a new experiment, I wanted to try and address another significant problem but not have to project be too ambitious like the last one. I decided to go off of one of the concerns raised over my last project: the danger of creating new harmful bacteria in the environment. Companies today are becoming more and more reliant on biotechnology as seen with all of our genetically modified crops and animals. These are easily accessible sources for genetic information for bacteria who are able to evolve by taking in genetic material floating in the environment. We have seen infectious bacteria in the past evolve by taking in genetic material from various other species as seen with the swine flu virus evolving through the genes of pigs and birds. Today, these sources for bacteria have been improved with genes that cause them to grow and breed faster and these genes could be copied by infectious bacteria to create a deadlier new species.
My new project will look into how efficiently bacteria can take in genetic material from the environment. Unfortunately, I will not be able to look into how bacteria can copy genes from a live host. Instead, I will be looking into how efficiently can bacteria take free floating genetic material in the environment to replicate the scenario of an infectious bacteria taking genes from a dead host. For this new experiment, I will be testing common bacteria like E. coli and C. freundii because these bacteria are the ones that are most likely to evolve from the DNA of genetically modified organisms due to the fact that they are everywhere. Also, these bacteria are opportunistic and can still be infectious. For the genetic material, I will be using pGLO (the gene that makes jellyfish glow) because I can easily tell if the bacteria successfully took the gene.
Hopefully this new project will turn out well and I will see you all next week.
- CJ Pimentel
I'm glad you found a new topic. I think that this will be an interesting research topic as well. It's good that you are tackling problems existent today. I hope you enjoy your next weeks with this!
ReplyDeleteIt's still unfortunate that you had to scrap your last project, but it never hurts to dream big! I am glad you managed to put together another project in a short amount of time and I hope everything goes well. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to hear you found a way to work around the obstacles and that you still have an interesting project! It's good that you'll be able to work with more common forms of bacteria so you can apply that in future research. Good luck with everything!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to hear that you're staying positive about your project! I know it's unfortunate that you had to scrap your last one but, at least you've been able to still research something that you're interested in. Good luck and I look forward to seeing your future posts!
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