Research Seed Grant awarded to Dr. Bouley and Dr. Petreaca

Ohio State Marion Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Renee Bouley and Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics, Ruben Petreaca recently received an Undergraduate Research Access Innovation Seed Grant from Ohio State in the amount of $10,000 for their research of evolution driven purifying detection in cancer cells.

Bouley and Petreaca were two of five faculty who teach at The Ohio State University at Marion to receive this grant. The grant will fund research opportunities for our students, help them build skills, experiences, and their resume, and support faculty research.

According to Bouley, their research engages undergraduate students in computational techniques to map mutational signatures in cancer driver genes and determine patterns and effects on protein structure. Students will perform sequence alignments and identify amino acids that are conserved across species and other mutations that are hotspots in cancer. Then they will map these residues onto a 3D protein structure to determine patterns and determine how cancer mutations may impact protein structure.

"There is a non-random accumulation of mutations in cancer that has been previously recognized by others and is called purifying selection," said Bouley. "This project aims to understand whether purifying selection is driven by amino acid conservation during evolution."