Alexandra Kameda Graduate Student, Desert Research Institute NSF "Research Experiences for Undergraduates" award recipient, Summer 2002 B.S. Humboldt State University Email: akameda@dri.edu

During the summer of 2002 I participated with GenEx² on a project entitled "Bioinformatic studies of environmental microbial gene diversity." This consisted of a crash course in DNA sequence analysis software, data processing, and management, followed by learning to assemble large contiguous regions of environmental DNA cloned from the environment. I have also designed the PCR primers for the first generation of Antarctic microbial DNA microarrays. Currently I am working on DNA sequence analysis of two different Antarctic environmental sequence reconstruction projects, one for an Antarctic Roseobacter, and the other a distant relative of a deep subsurface Bacteroidetes related microbe.