For Bates junior Rebecca Anderson, panoramic coastal views were a nice bonus during her recently concluded summer internship at the MDI Biological Laboratory, located in Bar Harbor, on Maine's Mount Desert Island.
But for Anderson, a double major in biochemistry and mathematics from Boone, N.C., the priceless view afforded by her internship was to see what life as a research scientist is like.
At MDIBL, Anderson worked in the lab of Joel Graber, Ph.D., senior staff scientist and director of computational biology and bioinformatics core. In addition to doing cutting-edge research, she got to talk with faculty and graduate students about their journeys. “It's been really cool to see all these different areas of science that I can be a part of and think about what I want do in the future.”
Graber and fellow scientists at MDIBL and worldwide are researching the axolotl, a Mexican salamander. With amazing regenerative abilities — it can regrow limbs and major organs — the salamander holds great promise as a model to study regeneration and regenerative medicine, "critical areas of study,” Anderson says, “because of their potential to improve human wound healing and tissue scarring.”
Anderson, who has a minor in digital and computational studies at Bates, joined the lab's work to develop a search tool that allows researchers to identify orthologs (genes that are derived from "the same gene" in a common ancestor) for axolotl genes within the human genome and other commonly studied organisms. Anderson’s project culminated in a community-wide presentation.
Her internship was funded by INBRE, an NIH program available to Bates students and faculty that supports research in cell and molecular biology, biochemistry, and neuroscience with preference given to projects focused on functional genomics.
Original source can be found here
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