Student Presenter(s): Jay Doshi
Faculty Mentor: Navin Pokala
School/College: Arts & Sciences, Old Westbury

Antimicrobial drugs can function as protein inhibitors that disrupt essential metabolic functions. As a defense, certain yeast is able to upregulate genes, so the produced proteins dilute the effects of the drugs. In the experiment, unknown Drug F hindered yeast mitosis, killing the yeast at last. To find protective genes, my partner and I conducted a high copy suppressor selection. This entails growing wild-type yeast in rich media and attacking the cells with serial dilution of Drug F. We then noted the specific diluted concentration of drug that killed most but not all yeast and used it to find candidates of resistance. To be specific, we mixed this goldilocks concentration into agar plates before adding yeast carrying various pieces of genomic DNA in plasmid. The following week, we extracted single colonies of growth, plating some in rich-media and others in leucine negative media and allowed them to grow. After one week, we purified the plasmid DNA from the resulting single colonies and transformed them into E. coli for amplification. The E. coli plasmid was purified and sent for sequencing. We investigated 5 genes from the reading, with OCA6 emerging as a probable candidate being protective against Drug F. OCA6 is needed to replicate DNA before mitosis. More research is needed to know if this exact gene is in fact causative for resistance.