Marci and her research topics
A brief bio: Marci is a freshman at Michigan State University. She is a biochemistry major and is in Lyman Briggs and the Honors College. She enjoys her classes and doing research at MSU. Marci's other studies include German and the cello, which she has played for 8 years. She is from Traverse City, Michigan.
Research: Marci has been working for Professor Maria Zavodszky since the beginning of the year as part of the Professorial Assistant (PA) program organized by the Honors College. Marci's biochemical research is all done at a computer. Her recent research projects have been docking small molecules (ligands) into various forms of the protein soybean lipoxygenase using the program SLIDE. This process is done by downloading a protein and a database of known ligands, identifying the protein's binding site, creating template points for the ligand screening, running SLIDE, then altering the screening parameters in order to take into account protein flexibility. The results can then be evaluated using the scores from SLIDE or the program Drugscore.
What's next: This research can be applied to finding drugs for cancer because soybean lipoxygenase is related to a human protein involved in cancer. Some of Marci's next research projects will branch off of this research. She will also be working with allosteric proteins by studying the conformational changes of these proteins inccured by ligand binding.