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.

Genetic Engineering of Zebrafish to Investigate Tumorigenicity of Cancer Mutations
Terry Shackleford, St. Marys University

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.

The effects of grazing of water coliforms and antibiotic resistant microbes
Kristy Duran, Adams State University; Benita Brink, Adams State University

Introducing hands on concepts of Mammalian Cell Culture and in vitro drug studies in Undergraduate course shells.
HIRENDRA BANERJEE, Elizabeth City State University
The process of learning is both visual and auditory and in the STEM fields, hands on and practicums enhances student learning, retention and understanding of the complex scientific concepts than just memorizing facts from class room lectures. Thus we plan to implement short hands on research modules in our Cell Biology and Human Physiology courses involving projects teaching students with mammalian cell culture techniques and in vitro drug testing skills. Students will learn to culture mammalian cancer cell lines with culture mediums and maintain the cultures in carbon dioxide incubators at ideal temperature, they will then treat them with novel anti cancer compounds to test the efficacy of these drugs and the IC50 doses(dose at which 50% cells dies).The data obtained will be statistically analyzed and results reviewed to study whether it aligns with the hypothesis and specific aims; students will then present their findings in a small research paper and short seminars in class along with their peers, they will be graded according to a rubric that will be provided to them in the beginning of the research experience process. Thus this process will align with CURE objectives of REU incorporation in undergraduate courses.

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

TRANSFER STUDENT CURE: Multi-organismal genomic analysis of molecular determinants of protein assembly.
Dylan Murray, University of California-Davis

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.

Animal Genome to Phenome - A CURE for food security
Mulumebet Worku, North Carolina A & T State University