Research and Working EQ

1.  What is your working EQ?

How can the ecology of microbial communities be better investigated?

or

What biological process has best enabled extremophiles to adapt to the severe environments they inhabit?

2.  What is a possible answer to your working EQ? Please write the answer in thesis format. 

•With metagenomics, genetic material can be recovered directly from the environment being studied, the analysis of which provides insight into the interactions within and biodiversity of a community.  

• With 3-D microscopic cages, microorganisms are deposited into microcommunities that scientists have complete control over and are thus able to study the interactions that develop.    

or

•Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) - the transfer of DNA between microbes - has enabled extremophiles to work together and take advantage of functional genes that allow them to inhabit severe environments.

•DNA repair mechanisms allow extremophiles to constanlty respond to their environments, enabling them to withstand such stresses as extreme heat and radiation. 

3.  What is the most important source you have used that has helped you come up with an answer to your working EQ?

My mentor and his colleague, Marc Baum, have been important, as I was first made aware of the existence of metagenomics by them.  A Primer on Metagenomics, a review I am currenlty reading, also inspired my first answer.  The article 3-D Printed Microscopic Cages Confine Bacteria in Tiny Zoos for the Study of Infections provided my second answer.

The article How hyperthermophiles adapt to change their lives: DNA exchange in extreme conditions is most important in determining my answers to my second possibl working EQ.

4.  Who is your mentor, or where are you volunteering, and how does what you are doing relate to your working EQ?

My mentor is Manjula Gunawardana and I am a volunteering at the Oak Crest Institute of Science.  My mentor and his fellow researchers there actually developed a method for extracting DNA from tar samples, overcoming the Taq-inhibitors present in tar that make qPCR - and, thus, the investigation of microbial ecology and biodiversity - so challenging to carry out, usually.  It is their protocol that I will be using in my independent component.  This is relevant to my investigation into the techniques researchers use to assess the ecology and biodiversity of microbial communities.  As for relevance to by second possible EQ, we are using this protocol to look into the functional genes of microbes and thus how they survive in the tar pits they inhabit.