BIOL 189T Fungal Biology
Alija Mujic, California State University-Fresno
The diversity, community structure, and functional diversity of fungi in the high Sierra is understudied and is largely unknown from the Sierra Nevada foothills. Through use of direct field sampling I will engage BIOL189T students in sampling efforts to elucidate the fungal biology of these understudied habitats. Students will sample fungal sporocarps (mushrooms) from existing field plots established by the National Environmental Observation Network (NEON) and use morphological identification techniques and DNA barcoding methods to identify the fungal diversity in these habitats. Future iterations of the course will likely focus upon selected fungal taxa identified in previous iterations of the course to investigate the phenology and ecological interactions of the fungal community in these habitats in NEON plots.

Designing Authentic Undergraduate Experiences in Research (DAUER)
Joseph Ross, California State University-Fresno
In this research experience, students will learn about how inheritance of diverse genetic material from their parents can impact the health (fecundity) of offspring. Students will design experiments to mate pairs of populations from a diverse global collection of microscopic worms and measure and compare the fecundities of their hybrid offspring.

Yeast, metabolism and suicide: a brewing introduction to biochemical research
Laurent Dejean, California State University-Fresno
This course provides the student with a range of techniques and methodology appropriate to the study or phenomena at the biochemical, cellular, and organismic levels. In the spirit of genuine undergraduate research (CURE), the students will be involved directly in research that is ongoing in the Dejean's lab, i.e. the study of the mechanisms used by Bcl-2 family proteins to cross-regulate cell death and energy metabolism. The students' involvement in this type of research will be following a set of preliminary experiments which are aimed at familiarizing the students with common biochemistry lab skills; and with the manipulation of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae which is to be used as the main model system in their research. Finally, the students will also engage directly with primary literature sources in preparation of their lab reports and an eventual presentation of their research at the Fresno State CURE symposium at the end of the semester.

Fruit Flies as a Model of Human Neurodegenerative Disease
Joy Goto, California State University-Fresno
Upper-division biochemistry and chemistry majors will learn and iteratively apply the techniques of protein purification, DNA and protein gels, Western blot, DNA isolation, transformation, enzyme characterization to research the utility of fruit fly (D. melanogaster) to model the human neurodegenerative disease (e.g. ALS - Lou Gehrig's, Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease).

Mutant Frogs, Hormones, & Genes: Using gene editing to investigate the molecular basis for hormone regulated development
Carla Fresquez, University of California-Davis
Students will investigate a most remarkable example of hormone action in nature: amphibian metamorphosis. They'll observe development of our model, Xenopus laevis, from fertilized egg to swimming tadpole, at which point they can simply add thyroid hormone to induced early metamorphosis. In this iteration of the CURE, students will characterize TALEN induced thyroid hormone receptor mutant lines, including the development of simple and reproducible PCR screening methods for genotyping the large numbers of embryos that result from mating in Xenopus, an advantage of the system if rapid genotyping can be developed. At the conclusion of the CURE, students will appreciate the amphibian life cycle and how the same hormone can cause drastically different cellular, tissue, and organ changes. They will also contribute directly to research on the role of different receptors in mediating those changes, specifically developing rapid PCR screening methods to identify tadpoles with genome editing induced mutations in specific receptor types.

Polymer/Materials Structure-Property Relationship Investigations for General Chemistry Students
Zuleikha Kurji, Saint Marys College of California

Going from big genomics data, to useful data, to experiments in diabetes
Talitha Van der Meulen, University of California-Davis
In diabetes, blood glucose levels are too high and people with diabetes suffer from severe side-effects that include cardiovascular disease, renal failure and blindness. Our lab is interested in studying the different cell types in the pancreatic islet that together regulate blood glucose levels. Our ultimate goal is to understand how human islet cells function and change in health and diabetes and then use this knowledge to contribute to a cure for or treatment of diabetes. In this CURE, students will become familiar with using so-called "omics" data and translating the data into a testable experiment that they will perform. The experiments will be done in the context of diabetes research that is ongoing in the Huising lab at UC Davis. Currently, we have large sets of information about gene expression at the mRNA level in healthy alpha, beta, and delta cells of the mouse pancreatic islet. Students will use bioinformatics techniques to process these sets and compare expression among these cell types during the first half of the course. For the second half, they will use this comparison to select a gene whose expression they will verify at the protein level in mouse pancreatic islets using fluorescent staining of tissue slices, followed by imaging and image-quantification. This process is a first step towards our ultimate goal of studying human islet cells. Once we have tools verified in mouse tissue, we can then apply these to human tissues. Therefore, we ask students to present their validation to the Huising lab.

Visualizing protein aggregates involved in human disease
Whitney Duim, University of California-Davis

Genes to Ecosystems
Laci Gerhart-Barley, University of California-Davis