Author: Olivia M. Blackmon, Ph.D.
For more than two decades, The George Washington University has hosted Research Days, a competition for students to showcase their research and compete for awards and prizes. This annual event highlights the breadth of research and discovery being conducted by undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students at GW.
Amanda Harbison, an undergraduate student in the Integrated Information, Science and Technology (IIST) program, won second place in the Molecular and Cellular Biology category for her project: Genome Structure via Crosslinking I: Method Development.
Honored to receive the award, Amanda credits the IIST Program and Director Sara Hooshangi, Ph.D, with connecting her with the Department of Physics’ Xiangyun Qiu, Ph.D. and graduate student Raju Timsina whose cutting edge research was presented for the award.
“The flexibility of the IIST program allows for professionals in the workforce to gain experience and knowledge. The program has also allowed for us to meet with influential people and gain connections that otherwise would not have been possible.”
In collaboration with Dr. Qui and Raju, Amanda’s award winning project used genome organization to help us understand the molecular assemblies associated with the regulation of gene expression. Due to the molecular scale, the challenge of identifying the proximity of DNA segments to one another becomes extremely difficult. With the use of a novel technique the DNA spatial organization can be reconstructed based on a proximity matrix. Photo reactive probes, mono-psoralen and bis-psoralen, are used to crosslink nearby DNA segments to generate a map of the genome. Amanda and Raju’s research found bis-psoralen to be successful in generating interduplex crosslinks within the DNA structure. With this newly acquired knowledge, they will use the GWPMC method with the photo reactive probe in other systems to determine genome packing and spatial organization.
Amanda will continue to pursue her work in cell biology, nanotechnology, environmental biology and neurogenetics, with the hope of pursuing a graduate degree.