Research Assistant Position for Prof. Phoebe Rice
Opportunity Description:
Research Assistant for Prof. Phoebe Rice:
Our overall goal is to understand a certain family of bacterial mobile genetic elements, the SCCs. In staphylococci, these can carry a methicillin resistance gene as a passenger, creating MRSA strains. However, SCC-family elements are widespread among this phylum, and often carry other genes that can be beneficial to the host bacterium. We are interested in how SCC elements are transferred among bacteria, what makes them stable once they reach a new host, and how at least some of them can make tandem repeats when their host is under selection for a passenger gene (e.g. when exposed to increasing methicillin, SCCs carrying that resistance gene can end up as multiple perfect copies, all in tandem repeat, which increases the hosts’ survival).
The portion of the project that the undergraduate will work on focusses on the DNA recombinases that are encoded by SCCs, and that do the inserting and excising from the host chromosome. We want to know which variants are most active, if and how they avoid accidental excision, what the most important features of their cognate DNA binding sites are, and to what degree they are active on one another’s DNA sites. To ask those questions, the undergraduate will use an E. coli – based assay that monitors recombinase-catalyzed flipping of a promoter between genes for a red and a green fluorescent protein. The project involves cloning and manipulation of plasmids and E. coli. Once comfortable with the basic assay and questions, we expect that the undergraduate will become increasingly independent and help to design more complex experiments. The work requires attention to detail, careful record keeping, reliable hours, an excitement about basic science and a curious mindset.
Application Process:
Phoebe Rice