Community Flood Risk Assessment from Rising/Surging Seas Project
Kevin Kupietz, Elizabeth City State University
Globally 634 million people, 10% of the world's population, live in coastal areas less than 10 meters above sea level. According to 2010 census data, 123 million people, 39% of the United States population, live in coastal counties with an estimated increase to this number by 8% in the 2020 census. As natural disasters have been seen to increase in frequency and severity in the past five years coupled with expected sea rises from climate change it is important that anyone involved with the safety and resiliency planning of their organization/community have an understanding of how to scientifically assess risk from flooding in order to mitigate and recover from the effects. This project allows students the ability to develop skills to utilize computer modeling systems and to apply the data to real world communities in examining risk to structures as well as different groups in the community.

Design2Data
Ashley Vater, University of California-Davis
The D2D program is centered around an undergraduate-friendly protocol workflow that follows the design-build-test-learn engineering framework. This protocol has served as the scaffold for a successful undergraduate training program and has been further developed into courses that range from a 10-week freshman seminar to a year-long, upper-division molecular biology course. The overarching research goal of this CURE probes the current predictive limitations of protein-modeling software by functionally characterizing single amino acid mutants in a robust model system. The most interesting outcomes of this project are dependent on large datasets, and, as such, the project is optimal for multi-institutional collaborations.

Random gene mutagenesis for gene identification linked to prodigiosin production in Serratia marcescens
Verena Carvalho, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
This lab course is designed to provide course-based undergraduate research experiences. You will learn how to prepare, execute, and interpret your own experiments. While all of you will conduct the same techniques in the course, each of you will create their own sets of mutant strains and study different features of your bacterium. We will study Serratia marcescens, an opportunistic, nosocomial pathogen, and is particularly linked to catheter-associated bacteremia, urinary tract infections, and wound infections. It is responsible for 1.4% of hospital-acquired infection cases in the United States. These bacteria are commonly found in the respiratory and urinary tracts of hospitalized adults, and in the gastrointestinal systems of children. Many strains of S. marcescens have a bright red colony color (a tripyrrole pigment called prodigiosin), while pigment production is often temperature-dependent. Prodigiosin is a secondary metabolite, and its expression is thought to be related to phosphate limitation. It was also identified as a natural bioactive substance with high potential for antibiotic and anti-cancer applications. It currently receives renewed attention for its wide range of potential applications, including activities as antimalarial, antifungal, immunosuppressant, and antibiotic agents. It is also prominently known for its capacity to trigger apoptosis of malignant cancer cells, and high activity against stationary phase Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme disease, has been demonstrated. Given its diverse effects, the exact mechanisms are currently not elucidated, and may be highly complex, including phosphatase inhibition, copper mediated cleavage of double stranded DNA, or disrupting the pH gradient through transmembrane transport of H+ and Cl- ions. Clearly, prodigiosin is a highly promising drug candidate, and is currently in preclinical phase study for pancreatic cancer treatment. In this course, we will use the transposon Tn5 to generate random mutations in the chromosome of Serratia marcescens. The transposon will be provided by a plasmid hosted in a donor E. coli strain, and transferred into your test bacterium via conjugation. We will then first select for successfully transposed mutants by testing for antibiotic resistance, and screen for your mutants that are altered in their pigment production. To identify the gene where the mutation has happened, we will remove the chromosomal DNA from the mutant strains, perform restriction enzyme digest, and generate self-circulating DNA. These plasmids are transformed into an E. coli strain that can replicate the fragment of genomic DNA that contains the transposon, and we can sequence the insertion site with the transposon DNA as anchor. In summary, in this course you will gain hands-on experience with modern genetic and biotechnological techniques, you will gain insights into bioinformatics and into working with public databases, which are all essential skills in modern microbiological research.

Water in Gen Chem
Ruthanne Paradise, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Synthesis and characterization of KLVFF derivatives: Propensity to aggregate?
Kalyani Maitra, California State University-Fresno
The aggregation of β-amyloid peptide plaques in the brain plays an important role in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Studies have shown that the specific peptide sequence of KLVFF (lysine, leucine, valine, phenylalanine, phenylalanine) has an important role in β-amyloid formation. In this research, pentapeptide derivatives of KLVFF containing nonpolar, hydrophobic amino acids will be synthesized and characterized by 1H-NMR spectroscopy. NMR-based structural studies will be done to understand the structure-function/activity relationship of these polypeptide chains in various solvents. This will provide a deeper insight about the process of aggregation of proteins in various physiological environment and its critical role in AD.

Using R to Build Powerful Predictive Models for Kaggle Competitions
Earvin Balderama, California State University-Fresno

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).

Investigating local climate change impacts in a STEM first year learning community
Mara Brady, California State University-Fresno
still in progress...

Effect of Short Blood Sample on Patient Results Validity
Anna Marti-Subirana, Phoenix College
This CURE addresses how body fluid short sampling affects result interpretation and diagnostics. Short sampling can lead to false result interpretation and misdiagnosis. No data are available on the impact of short sampling and clinical diagnostics.

Effects of Antimalarial Drugs (Artemisinin class) on Prostate Cancer Cells.
Dolapo Adedeji, Elizabeth City State University
Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in American men and the most non-skin cancer. It is a low-growing tumor occurring in older men and the most common type of non-skin cancer. Students will gain understanding in mammalian cell culturing, cell growth maintenance, cell seeding and be able to determine the concentration at which each drug concentration inhibit cell proliferation.