Penn State Schuylkill Genomics Education Partnership

Ellen, our youngest member and one of our newest, presented her work annotating a gene for the Puerto Rican parrot at the Penn State EnvironMentors Annual Symposium. Ellen is a high school students from the State College area and worked with Aimee, her undergraduate mentor on the project during the Spring 2024 semester as part of the EnvironMentors program here at Penn State. Ellen also received a special Sustainability award for the connections she made to conservation activities associated with this collaborative work. Ellen also presented her work at the Annual ePoster contest for ABRCMS (Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minitorized Scientists).

See Ellen’s poster below.

Research Project EnvironMentors Aimee and Ellen

Congratulations Ellen!!

This Spring semester we were really lucky to have several hard-working students involved in GEP Bioinformatics research projects. We had several students working on individual research projects, Salihah and Aliya. Additionally, we welcomed our first Penn State EnvironMentors team onboard, Aimee and Ellen. All these famous young women worked hard to complete their projects. Though different projects were involved, learning about how genomics can be used for improving education and conservation moved everyone forward.

This spring we are lucky enough to have a new team member join us and start doing some more bioinformatics. Please welcome to our little group, Alec Gossman. He is also a student at University Park working remotely as part of the team. I look forward to the work that Alec will be doing this semester.

Congratulations to genomics student Alexis Synder on her poster at the Fall 2022 Undergraduate Research Symposium. She did a wonderful job representing the research group and what students can do with bioinformatics through the GEP, especially as she was our first virtual presence at the conference.

Alexis placed first in the Biological and Health Sciences Division for the poster, Comparative Bioinformatics Between Fruit Fly Species. You can view Alexis’s information there or within this Bioinformatics-Poster (1).

Again, congratulations to Alexis.

From our student group, two students are ready to send in their F element projects describing the exons and introns of the Drosophila species. Within the F Element project, sections of the fourth or dot chromosome are examined for genes located in that region. Students have been able to confirm locations of these sites in comparison with the model organism, D. melanogaster. 

As part of the project, students also examine national databases to compare genetic sequences and protein sequences. The work gives students real-world experiences in bioinformatics and in performing research.

In 2022, I welcomed our first set of GEP students to the research group. Over the summer, we worked together for training for 3 famous young researchers for remote work. All 3 are University Park students, so it was a very different change of pace, especially since all of the work was done remotely.

Welcome Alexis Synder, Maha Lakshmi Vijaya Krishnan, and Grace Carolonza to the group.

Welcome to this site about the work of Genomics Education Partnership on the Penn State Schuylkill campus. Students participate in bioinformatics and genomics research under the guidance of Ms. Mary Ann Smith. This research program is offered both in person and remotely to any Penn State students.

The Genomics Education Partnership started in 2005 under the leadership of Dr. Sally Elgin. Supported initially by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the GEP has also been supported by the NSF, and currently by grants from the NIH and NSF. The GEP now has over 100 affiliated college and university faculty members, and last year 67 faculty from 66 schools actively participated, engaging over 1300 undergraduates. The three major GEP research projects are centered on analyzing the evolution patterns of genes in Drosophila and wasps through gene annotation. Annotation is the process by which a meaningful context is provided to the DNA sequence whereby students generate valid models for genes in various Drosophila or wasp species. Gene annotation is a challenging problem. Students learn to use a genome browser, which enables assembly of much of the data available for a given gene, drawing on evolutionary comparisons, computer-generated gene models, and RNA-Seq findings (evidence of gene expression).