Honors Program Theses

Award/Availability

Open Access Honors Program Thesis

First Advisor

Ira Simet, Honors Thesis Advisor

Keywords

Thermophilic fungi--Genetics; DNA polymerases;

Abstract

DNA polymerases are present in all living organisms and it is expected that there should be a reasonable degree of conservation, or similarity in how the polymerases function, between species. This makes the possibility of developing treatments using DNA polymerase more likely, as the treatment would not necessarily depend on using human DNA as the base material, which would be more expensive. However, this cannot be known unless there is a reasonable number of DNA sequences available from multiple species to analyze. This is a growing research, but the majority of sequences known are from mammals. Currently there is very little research on DNA polymerases in fungi. Dr. Ira Simet, Chelsea Meier, and I worked on this project to add to research literature. The fungus that we worked with, Thermomyces lanuginosus, has been studied very little in scientific literature. Although this meant that we had little prior research to base our methods on, any methods that we developed are significant additions to what is known about the fungus. We had to develop techniques to successfully grow large quantities of it, extract DNA, and find primers to begin sequencing a DNA polymerase a gene.

Year of Submission

2013

Department

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

University Honors Designation

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the designation University Honors

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

5-2013

Object Description

1 PDF file (25 pages)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

Included in

Biochemistry Commons

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