CEGS Minority Action
Plan
Summer Fellowships for Undergraduate Research
CEGS supports undergraduate
summer research through Caltech's
Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) and Minority Undergraduate
Research Fellowship (MURF) programs. Applications are encouraged
from students who wish to work in a modern academic research laboratory
under the guidance of experienced scientists and engineers. The program
will expose students to the excitement and opportunities of a research
career in genomics and systems biology. This experience will provide
excellent preparation for students interested in subsequently pursuing
a PhD. Qualified minority undergraduates will work on diverse projects
at the interface between genomics, imaging, developmental biology,
and bioinformatics. In exceptional cases, high school students
will also be considered for summer fellowships. Applicants
must be US citizens or permanent residents.
Post-graduate internship program
Fellowships are available to fund
minority MDs and PhDs (or those pursuing MDs and/or PhDs) to pursue
genomic research. Stipends
will be awarded to work in the laboratory of one of the four P.I.s
on the CEGS grant and will have a duration of 2-3 years. Applicants
must be US citizens or permanent residents.
Research Opportunities
Project 1
Comprehensive spatiotemporal analysis
of gene expression and function of the developing vertebrate embryo We
are developing techniques for performing in toto imaging that allow
us to repeatedly image multiple vertebrate embryos throughout their
embryonic development using in vivo time-lapse, confocal microscopy.We
will generate a large collection of zebrafish lines using a transposon-based
gene-trapping technology called "flip trapping". The
FlipTrap cassette forms a functional fusion protein with a green
fluorescent tag (GFP variant) when inserted into an intron. When
exposed to cre-recombinase, the cassette assumes a second conformation,
and generates a red fluorescent tag (RFP variant) gene trap and a
mutant allele for the trapped gene. Thus, each flip trap line can
be used to reveal the protein expression pattern (using the GFP fusion
trap) and the mutant phenotype (using the RFP gene trap). Using in
toto imaging, this information can be read out from the embryo
in vivo and non-invasively. Once validated in the zebrafish, our
goal is to apply this strategy to quail, an amniote that much more
closely resembles the developing human embryo.
Project 2
Design of quantitative, multiplexed, "hybridization
chain reaction" (HCR) amplifiers for in vivo imaging with
active background suppression We have designed and are testing
a new in situ amplification approach based on the mechanism of
hybridization chain reaction, in which fluorescently labeled DNA
monomers self-assemble non-covalently into tethered "polymers"
only when triggered by probes bound specifically to target mRNAs
or proteins. The design principles underlying this approach promise
to achieve specific and high resolution detection of multiple labels
simultaneously.
Project 3
Data analysis and integration of technologies
to produce "digital" fish
and bird We will generate 4-dimensional atlases that portray
the positions of cells, mRNA expression patterns, protein expression
and subcellular distribution patterns, and mutant phenotypes
over time quantitatively and at high resolution. These will be
compiled into a publicly available database that generates a "digital" organism
that can be analyzed and experimented on by others.
Principal Investigators
Minority Action Plan Coordinator
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