Three poster presentations of my students. Great job, guys!

– April 21, 2017

Today my students presented their molecular biology term projects at 4th Annual Grand View Scholarship Symposium. Very exciting! We were very nervous at the beginning of the semester when we started cloning the GAPDH gene from cilantro and rosemary (my students’ plant choice!) It was a very challenging project: sometime a time period of a lab was simply not enough to finish PCR or check bacterial growth. Students did a good job coming to the lab after or between classes to take care of their samples. Many thanks to our lab administrator, Jennifer Donnelly, and the department head, Idit Hazan, for their help with preparing samples and taking care of plants, as well as all the supplies we needed during the semester.

Anything could have gone wrong at any time, but here we go, we have three beautiful posters and 13 happy students who are proud of their work:

1. Omanovic E., Welsch A., Graving S., Christiansen K., Avanesyan A., Hazan I. Sequencing of GAPDH Gene in Cilantro and Rosemary.
2. Christofferson D., Miller R., Piatt D., Backer S., Reyes-Zuniga K., Avanesyan A., Hazan I. Sequencing the GAPDH Gene of Rosmarinus officinalis.
3. Geisinger S., Jones K., Sopher K., Salazar-Klock L., Avanesyan A., Hazan I. Sequencing of GAPDH Gene in Coriandrum sativum (Cilantro).

Furthermore, sequence of the GAPDH gene from rosemary, turned out to be particularly good, and we are currently preparing it for submission to NCBI GenBank. Feels great!