Team Experiences and Mentoring Strategies for Undergraduate Research
What this CURE is about:
Students will build a library of protein variants that will be aimed at assessing the binding interaction between two human proteins, in which the interaction has been implicated in ferroptosis – a non-apoptotic form of programmed cell death. Students will pick an amino acid residue (implicated in binding) to mutate, design primers, carry out mutagenesis, sequence mutant DNA, and optimize expression and purification of the mutant protein.
What this CURE is about:
Students in the interdisciplinary wetland CURE will study how hydrology and nutrient addition interact to influence plant-soil-microbial interactions. Students will examine how hydrology and nutrient enrichment directly and indirectly (via plant effects) affect wetland microbial structure-function relationships.
Learn more about this CURE here: WetlandEcoEx
What this CURE is about:
Students will use culture-based microbial tools to examine the effects of disturbance, nutrient addition, and their interaction on wetland soil bacteria at the West Research Campus long-term ecology experiment. Students will culture soil bacteria from the treatment plots and will measure morphological and biochemical traits. Students will evaluate how the long-term nutrient additions affect soil bacterial phenotypes.
What this CURE is about:
Influence of vegetation management on groundwater flow, surface water discharges, and nutrient transport at the West Research Campus. Students collect field samples for laboratory analysis and perform in situ field tests to determine the direction and rate of groundwater flow. Real-time sensor networks are used to quantify recharge rates and relate these to local mass balances which are related to the chemical and isotopic composition of soil and groundwater.