Presenter: Jok Mayak Leet

Faculty Sponsor: Jessica Crowley

School: Quinsigamond Community College

Research Area: Biology

Session: Poster Session 1, 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM, Auditorium, A19

ABSTRACT

Signaling pathways play a critical role in regulating metabolism, cell growth, and survival of the organisms. To understand how the proteins involved in these pathways function efficiently, it is important to examine how the genes that encode them have been conserved or evolved. This project aims to evaluate evolutionary changes in the SAPK-interacting protein 1 (sin1) gene in Drosophila obscura, using Drosophila melanogaster as the reference. This will be achieved by annotating the sin1 gene in Drosophila obscura using bioinformatics tools, USCS Genome Browser, and NCBI BLAST, to explore the genomic neighborhood, introns and exons, coding regions, and untranslated regions, and comparing these features with those of the sin1 gene in the well-annotated Drosophila melanogaster to determine evolutionary differences and similarities between these two species. This research will contribute to understanding how genes encoding pathway proteins have been conserved across species. Understanding genetic conservation in these Drosophila species is important, as it may help scientists gain insights into how the same genetic information has been conserved over time in humans and other organisms. This project is part of the Genomic Education Partnership (GEP) Pathways Project, an NSF/NIH-supported community of faculty and institutions that employs Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) to teach bioinformatics and genomics.