Animas High School offers a three week long program during May, called the Leading Internships for New Knowledge program (LINK). LINK is an internships program in which students are encouraged to go out and find internships with businesses that are doing what the student wants to do for a profession. Internships have ranged from working with the local Durango animal shelter, to working with U.N. Ade operations in Africa. Animas is based around a project based learning model, and the LINK internship program is directly in this path. LINK students learn how to apply their lessons to the working world and how to behave as adults in a shifting societal climate.
For my LINK internship, I chose to work in the Taatjes Biochemistry labs at C.U. Boulder. I worked under my mentor, Cecilia Levandowski, on her M.D. P.H.D. project. The aim of the project was to investigate the effects of co-expression of both the wild type P53(wtP53) and ΔnP53 transcription factors. ΔnP53 levels are elevated with stress, and also affect genome wide expression of wild-type P53. In isolated studies, co-expression of these two transcription factors has been shown to induce senescence (the cells age much faster than normal). The end goal of this project is to better understand how ΔnP53 affects the genome wide occupancy of wtP53 and the transcription of P53 related RNAs, and to see if co-expression of these genes truly does cause senescence. These goals will be accomplished by using the CRISPR-Cas9 system to perform a replacement of wtP53 with a modified gene. This modified gene consists of the ΔnP53 gene tethered to the wtP53 gene. This replacement will force transfected cells to co-express these genes, since they will be coded and transcribed as a single gene.
For my LINK internship, I chose to work in the Taatjes Biochemistry labs at C.U. Boulder. I worked under my mentor, Cecilia Levandowski, on her M.D. P.H.D. project. The aim of the project was to investigate the effects of co-expression of both the wild type P53(wtP53) and ΔnP53 transcription factors. ΔnP53 levels are elevated with stress, and also affect genome wide expression of wild-type P53. In isolated studies, co-expression of these two transcription factors has been shown to induce senescence (the cells age much faster than normal). The end goal of this project is to better understand how ΔnP53 affects the genome wide occupancy of wtP53 and the transcription of P53 related RNAs, and to see if co-expression of these genes truly does cause senescence. These goals will be accomplished by using the CRISPR-Cas9 system to perform a replacement of wtP53 with a modified gene. This modified gene consists of the ΔnP53 gene tethered to the wtP53 gene. This replacement will force transfected cells to co-express these genes, since they will be coded and transcribed as a single gene.