Myra Woody

Past Projects

Past projects Myra has been working on in Mr. Renz’s classroom throughout the year 2023 are the Kool-aid column chromatography back in the lab as well as making solutions in labs 2.C and 2.D. Labs done in lab 3 were making microbiology media, the disk diffusion test, making different kinds of yogurt media, gram staining, quantifying bacteria numbers, and staining cheek and onion cells. Lab 4 was mostly running gels, doing dye electrophoresis, digesting enzymes, doing forensic DNA fingerprinting, and messing around with a gel simulator to predict how her gel would look like at the extension activity.

Current Projects

Myra is currently working on Kool-Aid column chromatography and working with dyes from different candies. She is also working on how to properly run gels and how to mix the enzymes with the proper enzymes. Myra is also working on transforming plasmids and making agarose agar plates. Myra would like to work on altering DNA strands. Myra also would like to do the worm plate project.

Personal

Myra was born in Seattle and has lived in Tukwila ever since. She likes to practice her music and mess around with the things around her. Myra is always curious about how things work. Myra started working in the lab in 2021 as a freshman and hopes to become a more advanced technician in her senior years.

Publications

Experimental evolution of S. cerevisiae for caffeine tolerance alters multidrug resistance and TOR signaling pathways

Renee C. Geck, Naomi G. Moresi, Leah M. Anderson, yEvo Students, Rebecca Brewer, Timothy R. Renz, M. Bryce Taylor, Maitreya J. Dunham

G3, 2024, 14(9), jkae148; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.28.591555

Summary:

Yeast can adapt to grow in high concentrations of caffeine. In collaboration with high school students, we grew yeast in increasing concentrations of caffeine to select for ones better adapted to caffeine. We sequenced these yeast to identify mutations that promote growth in caffeine, and showed they are related to pumping caffeine out of the cell, or changing pathways within the cell that are otherwise blocked by caffeine.

Complete Paper is available on the on the G3 - Genes, Genomes, Genetics website and is titled “Experimental evolution of S. cerevisiae for caffeine tolerance alters multidrug resistance and TOR signaling pathways”

Experimental evolution of S. cerevisiae for caffeine tolerance alters multidrug resistance and TOR signaling pathways

Renee C. Geck, Naomi G. Moresi, Leah M. Anderson, yEvo Students, Rebecca Brewer, Timothy R. Renz, M. Bryce Taylor, Maitreya J. Dunham

bioRxiv 2024.04.28.591555; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.28.591555

Summary:

Yeast can adapt to grow in high concentrations of caffeine. In collaboration with high school students, we grew yeast in increasing concentrations of caffeine to select for ones better adapted to caffeine. We sequenced these yeast to identify mutations that promote growth in caffeine, and showed they are related to pumping caffeine out of the cell, or changing pathways within the cell that are otherwise blocked by caffeine.

Complete Paper is available on the on the bioRxiv preprint server for Biology and is titled “Experimental evolution of S. cerevisiae for caffeine tolerance alters multidrug resistance and TOR signaling pathways”

Experimental evolution of caffeine-tolerant yeast alters multidrug resistance and PP2A-like signaling pathways

We successfully evolved caffeine-tolerant clones in collaboration with high school classrooms using our yEvo protocol. The most commonly observed mutations corroborate previous findings that yeast evolved to have increased caffeine tolerance acquire different mutations than the mutation profile from other selective pressures like azole drugs.

Research completed under the guidance of Dr. Renee C. Geck of the Dunham Lab by Foster High School's Intro to Biotech class as part of the yEvo project 2022-2023 School year.

230720_PNWYC_Geck_poster.pdf