Exploring the Building Blocks of Life

In high school, Katherine Grover thought she might choose music as her college major.

“But I don’t like to perform,” says the pianist, who grew up in Wellsville, Utah.

 

Then came a biology class at Mountain Crest High School taught by Utah State University alum Larry Litizzette.

 

“His class was great and really got me interested in science,” says Grover, “But I still wasn’t sure about my college destination.”

 

Participation in Utah State’s Center for Integrated BioSystems’ week-long Summer Biotechnology Academy cemented her decision.

 

“Once I saw what USU had to offer, I was really excited – I was hooked,” says Grover, now a veteran undergraduate peer advisor in USU’s Biology Department.

 

As the Undergraduate Research Fellow and Presidential Scholarship recipient completes her fourth year at Utah State, she’s building an impressive resume of research experience. With faculty mentor Paul Cliften, Grover is pursuing projects focused on learning about the origins of new gene function after genomic duplication. Along the way, she’s discovered her affinity for computational biology.

 

“Some of my peers find this field boring, but I like that our work moves quickly,” she says. “I can pull out results in a few hours.”

 

Grover and Cliften study yeast genes. Yeast make good study subjects, she says, because several of the species are fully sequenced; some are partially sequenced, and they’re fairly easy to analyze.

 

“Plus, our research is very cost-effective,” she says. “It doesn’t require a lot of money; it just requires a computer.”

 

The team has studied two related yeast species, Saccharomyces cerevisae and Saccharomyces castellii, whose common ancestor underwent an entire genome duplication.

 

“By comparing existing duplicated genes in the species, we can infer whether the functional divergence occurred before or after the speciation event,” Grover says.

 

For the project, she and Cliften used bioinformatics tools and wrote computer programs in a scripting language called Perl to compare the related genes in the two species. Writing ad hoc Perl scripts was a new skill for the undergrad, who found the technique daunting at first.

 

“But you get the hang of it,” says Grover, who keeps a well-worn programming guide at the ready. “Perl gets the job done and that’s what we need.”

 

She has presented her research in various forums. In 2006, Grover won an award for her poster at the spring Biology Undergraduate Student Research Symposium. In 2007, she presented to Utah legislators at Undergraduate Research Day on Capitol Hill in Salt Lake City, then at the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research, along in Salt Lake, and the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in San Francisco.

 

“Exploring the evolution and mutation of genes is important because it shows how evolution occurs and how an organism might evolve in the future,” Grover says.

 

For their current research, Grover and Cliften are studying yet another yeast species, Candida tropicalis, by comparing it to six other closely related species.

 

The pair is trying to identify species that could be sequenced and compared, to fuel efforts to learn more about the fungus. Candida tropicalis is a major cause of opportunistic infections in people with compromised immune systems.

 

“We’re looking for non-coding RNA,” Grover says. “Piece by piece we’re studying how cellular processes work.”

 

As she looks toward the conclusion of her undergraduate studies, Grover is considering graduate school and a career in research.

 

“I like research and I like computational biology,” she says. “You can find really interesting information through this discipline that you can’t find under a microscope or in a gel.”

 

Advancing efforts in genomics research are yielding reams of data – more than the scientific community can keep up with.

 

“That’s where computational biologists step in,” Grover says. “We can process the data and foster discovery.”

 

Contacts: Katherine Grover, k.a.grover@aggiemail.usu.edu; Paul Cliften, 435-797-7627; cliften@biology.usu.edu

 

Writer:  Mary-Ann Muffoletto, 435-797-3517, maryann.muffoletto@usu.edu