MY JOURNEY WEST BY JOSHUA MATHEW
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s a scholar at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), I am always exposed to a myriad of opportunities. One such opportunity was the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Agricultural Research Service (ARS) “Science in Action” Summer Internship Program. This program gave students like me the opportunity to intern at locations such as Albany, California, Hilo, Hawaii, Corvallis, Oregon, and Tucson, Arizona while receiving a paid salary, round-trip airfare, funding for housing, and much more benefits. My prior research experience with the USDA began at UTRGV in the Fall of 2016, under the Talent in Agriculture for Climate Change and Food Security Adaptation (TACFSA) program. Through TACFSA I was able to research Citrus Greening and its effects on the Rio Grande Valley. With the support of the program director, Dr. Teresa Feria Arroyo, I was able to create my own project and present at our university conference. Through my year-long experience, I knew that I wanted to pursue another research endeavor and I later applied and was accepted for the USDA Science in Action initiative. For the past 8 weeks, I have spent my time in Albany, California, at the USDA ARS Western Regional Research Center. I was selected to work under the guidance of research geneticist Dr. James Thomson who serves as the labs’ principal investigator. Through Dr. Thomson, I was assigned a project that pertained to a phloem-specific promoter, Small cyclic amphipathic peptides (SCAmpPs), that would aid in the defense of a plant. The plant utilized in this project was the Arabidopsis thaliana as it has a rapid life cycle of six weeks as well as prolific seed production for future experiments. My overall goal was to grow the plants and stain them with GUS, a gene expression system, throughout different stages of their life and analyze the effectiveness of the promoter through microscopic images.
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In this project, I began by sterilizing 10 sets of Arabidopsis thaliana seeds that already had the phloem-specific promoter in place. From this step, I proceeded to spread the seeds onto agar plates that contained a certain selection of antibiotics such as kanamycin and timentin, as well as benomyl, a fungicide. Next, I left the plates over the weekend in a cold room so that they would not grow and instead placed them in a growth chamber the following Monday to ensure that the seeds would germinate evenly.