jzahir

Most of my work has involved genetic manipulation of safe strains of e. coli and running mini-preps for sequencing.

Since I live next to a River and Puget Sound, I have been taking regular water samples in the area for dissolved oxygen, pH etc. and cataloging phytoplankton.  My main interest is in isolating phages that target these plankton and building a meta-genomic profile of them as a baseline.  Between the rapid acidification of this part of Puget Sound, the fresh water of the river and the viruses brought by the sea lions that have migrated here to catch salmon I’m pretty sure the profile will be changing over the next decade.  The reason I’m using phages is because the small size of their RNA and even smaller areas that aren’t highly conserved make them good candidates for mutations under the stresses of the environment.