Professor Naomi Morrissette would like to recruit a junior or senior year CHP student to join her lab as a 199 student and help her with a time-sensitive project on tubulin mutations. She needs for the student to have experience with creating webpages such that the information that the lab compiles in this project can be made available on a resource page for interested scientists. Early on a big part of the project will involve helping her complete and cross-check a database of all characterized tubulin mutations (there are hundreds) which will accompany a large article that I she writing. This means that she is also looking for a detail oriented, and organized student. She has a largely complete set of mutations, but this information needs to be cross-checked, updated and compiled. Later on she envisions that the student will use protein alignments to test some ideas about the role of specific conserved amino acids in tubulins. As tubulins are a target for cancer drugs (such as Taxol) tubulin genes are often mutated in resistant cancers. Moreover, tubulin mutations have recently been identified as underlying new types of profound birth defects. This project has lots of relevance for human health and should be quite interesting.
Interested students should contact Professor Morrissette at nmorriss@uci.edu.