Hi everyone!!! Greetings from the Lone Star State! I'm Alberto and I hope that all of you had a great summer research experience and that all of you are enjoying of the short summer break before going into full throttle. I finally decided give an update: I worked in Prof. Michael Levine lab at Berkeley (for those that don't know he's a fly geneticist) studying the role of a stably bound (or paused) polymerase at genes during early embryogenesis.
To give you a little background, starting the moment the fruit fly egg is laid, the embryo goes through super fast nuclei cleavage along with hundreds of signaling cascades that leads to the patterning formation of the syncytium blastoderm. All this is highly regulated at the level of transcription through transcriptional cofactors and chromatin remodeling complexes. Not long ago was discovered that genes that are turned on during early stages of the fly embryo have a 'stably bound polymerase', meaning that it remains at the promoter region of the gene without the help of transcriptional cofactors. In other words, the polymerase just sits there and is 'ready to roll'. With that, the graduate student and I hypothesized that a stalled Pol II is to enhance synchronous activation. I specifically looked at how genes with paused Pol II are turned more synchronous and less stochastic vs. genes with non-paused Pol II.
The REU program had a similar agenda to SPUR (seminars, workshops, interviews, GRE, etc). As any other summer research program, hours in the lab were long but that did mean I couldn't relax and see interesting things around campus, like the protest to save a grove of redwood trees from 'Guantanamo Berkeley'. I'm glad I came back to the Bay Area because I was able to go around visitng friends and spent some quality time with my family.
Well, I think that's it for the update and see you all at the MARC symposium!
Con gusto,
-Alberto Ponce
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