Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Olivia MacDonald

Producing Stable Transformants in Maize using Proprietary Transformation Vectors

This summer I will be continuing my two years of effort to produce a stable maize transformant. I will be using a proprietary strain of agrobacteria, a bacteria that inserts its genome into that of plants to insert my genes of choice into embryos of maize and seteria. This process does not provide reliable transformants yet, so I will be testing how the plant’s genotype affects efficiency of transformation, as well as the agrobacterium genotype and effects of transformation helper plasmids. Additionally, I will be genotyping my transformants and observing their phenotypes using techniques such as tissue sectioning and staining and fluorescence microscopy.

Message To Sponsor

Thank you so much for your donation to support my continuation of 2 years of research on this project. I haven't been able to dedicate as much time as I would like to my research due to heavy course loads, and this summer I will be able to really delve into my research and hopefully produce the stable maize transformant line I have been working on this whole time. Additionally, this will give me the experience of working in a lab full time, in order to help prepare me for life in research as well as helping narrowing my research interests and skills for grad school.