April 11, 2002
Contact: Annie Johnson (509-963-3468/fax 509-963-2301/e-mail: johnsann@cwu.edu)
ELLENSBURG, Wash. - Central Washington University’s natural science seminar series resumes April 19 at 4 p.m. in Science Building 147 with university biological sciences professor Steve Verhey’s presentation “The Undergraduate Genome Project.”
Verhey will discuss a nationwide project involving undergraduate students in the key final steps of sequencing the entire genome of a bacterium called Spiroplasma citri (S. citri), a plant pathogen that infects plants from horseradish to orange trees.
The project is interesting for several reasons, according to Verhey.
“First, college students don’t get to work on projects like this, and usually the work is done by graduate students or even people with Ph.D.’s,” he says. “Second, S. citri is a very interesting organism. It has a fairly small genome, about 1/10,000th the size of the human genome. It has such a small genome, in fact, that some scientists think it may be close to the minimum genome size for a living organism.”
The project is the subject of a grant proposal to the Microbial Genome Project, which is a joint effort of the United States Department of Agriculture and National Science Foundation.
If funded, the grant will provide money to sequence the genome and to have students carry out the critical process of “finishing” the genome. Verhey will be describing these processes and talking about how large projects like this are put together.
The CWU biology club sponsors the free, public presentation. For more information, or for persons of disability to arrange for reasonable accommodation, call (509) 963-1333, or (for the hearing impaired) TDD (509) 963-3323.
