The Loyola community has accepted me into its family, and I have taken advantage of the opportunities that I was given. I know my knowledge is expanding in the service of humanity through learning, justice, and faith. I have been working as a writing tutor at the Writing Center, a student researcher at Loyola University Chicago, and an altar server at Madonna Della Strada Chapel. I began working at the Writing Center at Loyola University Chicago since Fall 2014. I really enjoy being a part of the service and the environment that the writing center provides. It definitely should be necessary for writers to go to the writing center to look over their work and have an experienced writing tutor look over it, too. My writing process consists of organizing my ideas together in a web, producing a draft, organizing it, and revising it with the help of tutors and professors. It takes a lot of thinking and brainstorming to create the best rough draft. Once the rough draft is finished, it is important for a writing tutor to look at it to make sure that my writing makes sense. This helps me become more of a confident writer because the people that help me through the revision process help me recognize my mistakes in my writing. This process is the best way that works for me. Everyone has a different writing process. It really depends on the type of writer that you are and what works best for you. The ultimate goal for each writer is to clearly present your own writing in a format that makes sense to your target audience. Writing is a powerful tool that gives you a chance to express yourself and make an argument that lets the world know what you think. The Writing Center helps students become better writers and gives them a chance to look at their work again.

I have been working in the laboratory with Dr. Doering, and our focus is primarily genetics. The overall objective of our laboratory experiment is to create a physical map of the short arm of Chromosome 21 in order to identify the highly repetitive regions in the human acrocentrics. We are looking at the 6kb sequence in order to indicate how the heterochromatic regions differ with respect to the malignancy of cancer, specifically prostate cancer cells. The 6kb region that I am looking at from HC21p was cloned, and it was also sequenced. The goal of my project is to analyze the similarity of the 6 kb region on all acrocentric chromosomes. The primer 4 region is the region that I am focusing on, which is designed for PCR procedures in order to confirm the presence of this sequence. For the region that I am currently working on, Jenna, a previous lab member, designed two sets of bisulfite sequencing primers: one for the normal, unconverted DNA and one for converted (bisulfite-treated) DNA. Both of these primer sets that Jenna has created have an amplicon size of 578bp and contain 16 CpG sites. The unconverted primers were first used in a PCR with the hybrid cell line for HC21, WAV17 and the plasmids were purified successfully by MINI prep. Jenna has helped me take over her experiment, and we have clones for unconverted WAV 17 DNA from Jenna. My job is to amplify the F4/R4 region, clone it, sequence it, and give methylation data using QUMA.

Once I am done with converted placental and converted WAV17, I can move on to WBC, which I have no data for. I want to be as productive as possible during the winter break and get as much results as I can, so I can move forward to getting results for WBC. I hope to start working on WBC over the summer, but that depends on my results with converted placental and converted WAV17. After I complete WAV17, WBC, and placental, I can move on to the cancer cells! I will be able to look at the prostate cells and get methylation data from prostate cancer cells. Therefore, we will use the bisulfite sequencing primers that we have created to observe the methylation patterns on cancerous cells, specifically prostate cells that are malignant. Once we get this information, we can analyze the differences between the methylation patterns of both the normal and the cancerous cells. Once we observe the methylation patterns and analyze them, we will be moving on to analyzing the histone modifications in the 6kb region through the methods of qPCR and ChIP. I am really looking forward to working with the cancerous cells because that will give me the chance to compare the methylation patterns between cancerous and noncancerous cells.