Meet Our Scholars
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Leandra Brettner
Meet Leandra Marie Brettner, the recipient of the College of Science Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award for Fall 2012. Learn about her research projects; how she got involved; and what doing research meant to her.
Leandra Marie Brettner
Major(s): Engineering Mathematics, Molecular and Cellular Biology
Career Plans: My immediate plans are to attend graduate school with the aim of earning a Ph.D. in synthetic biology
Research Faculty Mentor(s): Joanna Masel
All cells experience some level of stochastic, or noisy, gene expression. This noise can have a variety of consequences, some of them useful but mostly harmful. The strategies cells use to cope with these random fluctuations are just recently coming to light (thanks to some clever studies by scientists such as Michael Elowitz, Jonothan Raser, and Erin O'Shea among others). Switch-like kinetics through cooperativity are one such way to generate robustness to noise, especially in genes vulnerable to accidental turn-on. By establishing a minimum concentration threshold before any protein activity is seen, the cell can respond to only signals of adequate magnitude. Homo-oligomers are potentially prime candidates for cooperative binding given that a single transcription pathway provides all of the necessary components and similar proteins bind similar substrates. Sigmoidal kinetics attenuate noise post translation and at the activity level, relaxing selection pressures on transcription mechanisms and concentration levels. Thus, we expected homo-oligomerization to be correlated with noisy gene expression and/or variable expression across environments. I tested these relationships in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. I assessed homo-oligomerization status by looking for self interactions in protein-protein interaction databases. I then compared the noise (as characterized by Newman et al. 2006) and variable expression across mRNA microarray experiments of self interacting proteins to non-self interacting proteins. While homo-oligomerization does not mitigate gene noise genome-wide, it appears to do so within a subset of biologically relevant genes. In genes with TATA box promoters and multiple non-self protein-protein interactions, homo-oligomers show greater noise and variation across experimental conditions than proteins that do not self interact.
How did you find your research opportunity; how long did you participate; and were you funded, take it for course credit, or volunteered your time?
In my sophomore year, I applied to UBRP. I found Dr. Masel's lab through the list of UBRP faculty. I have been a UBRP sponsored member of her group for the last two and a half years.
What do you feel is the biggest benefit to participating in undergraduate research?
Research is the kind of field where you really don't know if you like it until you have tried it. Figuring that out early on in the game makes one better prepared to pursue graduate school, medical school, or any research based industry position.
What advise would you give to a fellow student thinking about participating in undergraduate research?
Do it! Try to get involved as early on in your undergraduate career as possible. The majority of the faculty are eager or willing to take undergraduates in their labs, so contact everyone you are interested in to see if any of them have openings. Also consider applying to programs like UBRP and the NASA Space Grant which facilitate lab placement and foster community.