Understanding mating determination in Tetrahymena thermophila

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 19:00:00 -0500

The fundamental contribution of this work is discovery. Identification of the location of the mating type genes and unravelling the mechanism of mating type determination provide novel insight into a process of DNA rearrangement that could have implications across all Eukaryotes. Tetrahymena thermophila has a history of being a robust model organism. For example, telomeres were first uncovered in Tetrahymena, a discovery that resulted in a Nobel prize. By uncovering the location of the genes we have provided the basis for studying homologous recombination in a highly tractable organism, which should lead to further insights by ourselves and others. In addition, we have begun detailing the mechanism involved in the rearrangement, which could have implications in cancer and immunology research.

The secondary contribution is in making our results available and accessible to the public. By publishing in an open source journal we insured that our results would be freely available to the public. In addition, we issued a press release and performed a number of interviews in the mainstream media to transmit our work to a broader audience. The result was that our work was written about in wide range of media outlets, from high level scientific journals (Nature, Science etc.) to popular science magazines (Discovery, Popular Science etc.) to general news outlets (NBC News, Huffington Post, Reddit etc.). In this way we have strived to inform the public of our work, both so they know the results of public scientific funding and to achieve a more scientifically literate public.

Last but not least, IGERT Trainee Michael Lawson had the opportunity to obtain first-hand experience in both experiment and modeling, and the synergistic feedback between the two.