Desert Vista Students Have Research Results Accepted for Publication

Submitted by Nori Cannell, written by Birgit Musheno

Hi everyone!

It’s not exactly light reading, but a group of students from my 2010 and 2011 Honors Biotechnology course have had their research results accepted for publication by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) — the online database used by biotechnologists worldwide. The 2010 students spent the spring semester extracting DNA from Pineapple Sage plants, isolating it, amplifying it, and submitting it for sequencing at the Joint Genome Institute labs in San Francisco. Then they had the hard work of analyzing the results to see whether they had indeed discovered the sequence for a gene that no one had yet published for this plant. The 2011 students took up the data from the previous year when their own experiment yielded no results, and they finished the job of verifying and preparing the data for publication. Abhi Umashankar (’11) took the data through NCBI’s approval process, and this is the result! You can see it published here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/JN007034. Great work all of you!