NASA: Oxidative Stress Response of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to heat shock

I spent two summers at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC, 2013 and 2014) under the guidance of Dr. Oana Marcu as a research assistant and a member of the NASA Ames Academy for Space Exploration. The NASA Academy is a a highly-selective program focused on leadership, team-building, and research through both an individual and group project. My individual project, which later transformed into my senior honors thesis, characterized the response of unicellular alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to stress by examining biochemical and gene expression changes. During my first summer, 2013, an accidental media contamination unexpectedly led to increased growth and lipids, producing differential responses in our new “super” alga culture. My work on this “super” culture formed the foundation of a funded DOE grant between NASA ARC and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

When I returned to Wellesley College after my second summer at NASA ARC, I convinced Professor Wolfson, my research advisor since my first year at Wellesley, to co-advise me in studying C. reinhardtii as my senior honors thesis. I secured my own funding through the NASA Space Grant Consortium to establish an environment conducive for algal growth at Wellesley and to travel back to NASA ARC in January to access an advanced qPCR gene expression machine. Ultimately, I found that the heat shocked, stressed, C. reinhardtii exhibited an increase in reactive oxygen species (ROS) and selective regulation of copper ion transporters. My results provided new insights into the cellular response to stress and its possible mediation during space flight, as well as a basis for understanding the evolution of multicellularity when compared to previous Marcu Lab work examining the multicellular alga Volvox carteri. My work received a Best Poster Award in the Plant Metabolism Division at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) national meeting in March 2015.