Graduate Research Assistant
Urbana, Illinois, Us
• Assist in multiple summer field projects involving the genetic modification and growing of tobacco plants. Also involved the use of multiple types of tools, and farm techniques.• Run independent projects such as genetically crossing plants, Polymerase Chain Reactions, Bacterial Transformations, and DNA/RNA extraction for data useable by the supervising post doc• Digitized collected data and created Excel spreadsheets/graphs for use in published papers • Ran an independent bioinformatics project using lipidomics, metabolomics, and RNA-seq. Attempting to use this data to see if modified tobacco plants have differences in metabolites and lipids that play an important role in photosynthesis or photorespiration. • Clean and transform data using Excel for use in other programs• Carry out statistical analysis and create custom graphs for publication using R programming on lipid, metabolite, and RNA-seq data• Use custom Unix scripts to run RNA-Seq data through alignment and counting programs on the campus supercomputer (STAR, Salmon, FeatureCounts, etc.) for later analysis in R• Use BioNetStat to develop a network of metabolites, lipids, and genes