Official Senior Project Blog Starting Now!

Hello! My name is Erika, and I am a senior student at BASIS Scottsdale. During the final trimester the seniors are encouraged to take on a senior project, blog about it on a biweekly basis, and present on the results at the end of the school year. This is my blog. I will be participating in one of Dr. Huentelman's labs at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, or TGen. Dr. Huentelman has a few labs, including ones specializing in Alzheimer's,   and autism, and cognitive aging. The purpose of these labs are to find the genetics factors for the unfavorable trait, and apply those findings to produce a medication to combat it. For example, having the ApoE4 gene in both copies of someone's genetic code greatly increases the risk of late-onset Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Huentelman's lab hopes to find a common section of code that possibly neutralizes the effect of the ApoE4 allele by analyzing the DNA of people who have two copies of ApoE4, but do not have Alzheimer's. One of his labs also focuses on analyzing dog DNA and extrapolating the results to humans. Because of the founder effect, certain dogs are genetically predispositioned for certain diseases and conditions. By finding dogs that don't exhibit the particular trait, the lab can try to pinpoint the section of DNA keeping the dog healthy, and apply that knowledge when looking at human samples. I soon hope to know which lab I will be working, and once I do, I can produce a formal proposal and put it on a page in this blog. Until then, I wait anxiously checking my email.