REPU MAGAZINE N 3
2015 REPU Research Projects
2017
Maria Fernanda Senosain - Texas A&M University
Young Laboratory, USA
A bacteriophage is a virus that infects and replicates within a bacteria.
The virus recognizes and attaches to specific receptors in the surface of
the bacteria and injects its genome which is replicated and transcribed to
form the viral particles. Once the maturation process is complete, lysis is
induced and the viral progeny is released. In spite of being considered as
potential antibacterial therapeutics, research about phages was left apart
due to the discovery of antibiotics. Nowadays, the emergence of
pathogenic bacteria resistant to most currently available antimicrobial
agents has become a critical problem, which could be addressed with the
use of phages. The Young lab is primarily focused on the molecular
mechanisms by which bacteriophages, or bacterial viruses, accomplish
host cell lysis. During the internship, Maria Fernanda worked on the
isolation of bacteriophages against clinical strains of Acinetobacter
baumanii, which is a gram-negative pathogenic bacteria resistant to most
antibiotics. The isolation of several bacteriophages against this bacteria together with the annotation of the
phages genomes is an important contribution toward the use of phage therapy in the future.
*Update: Maria Fernanda is currently a PhD student at Vanderbilt University.
REPU - Chemistry
Rodrigo Beltrán - Yale University
Brudvig Laboratory, USA
During the last decade, efforts have been made towards research on
alternative energy resources, such as solar energy. Solar fuel cells are
capable of transforming solar energy into "useful" energy by the water
oxidation reaction. This reaction is energetically and kinetically demanding
and needs a catalyst to occur at normal conditions. The Brudvig Lab
studies the chemistry of water oxidation in natural photosynthesis and to
model this water-oxidizing chemistry with synthetic catalysts. Iridium
organometallic complexes are the precursors which can be activated to
form water-oxidation catalysts by the addition of a chemical oxidant or an
electrode potential. Once oxidized, they become highly active catalysts
capable of high rates of oxygen evolution with low overpotentials. Rodrigo
worked on the characterization of the molecular species derived from the
activation of two precursors, Cp*Ir(pyalc)OH and (CO)2Ir(pyalc), through
UV-Vis spectroscopy, cyclic voltammetry and NMR spectroscopy. The
results from Rodrigo's work have been published as part of a paper on Inorganic Chemistry.
*Update: Rodrigo is currently a PhD student at Technische Univeristät Berlin.
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