The Beginning!

So it's the first official day of interim, but I feel like I've been working on this project forever.

     It started way back at the end of my freshman year (last year, the end of spring semester), after just coming out of Dr. Moss's Genetics class and Dr. Hettes's Cellular Biology Class. After those series of classes I had become intensely interested in Mitochondria (I even wrote a paper about the endosymbiotic theory of mitochondria, which is available on my other blogger account). Dr. Moss had suggested a interim of studying something in mitochondria. But the real question was what to study?

      Well, after the summer of deliberating and a lot of help and suggestions from Dr. Moss, I decided on a topic (which I really don't think is all that cohesive nor sound research, but interesting none the less). My topic is a study on the correlation of mitochondrial haplotypes, which are like genetic 'ethnicities' or 'races', and how people perceive their ethnicity or heritage to to be.  These correlations that I am hoping to draw will either show no difference between perceived mtDNA and ethnicity and self reported ethnicity, or there will be a profound difference between the two.

       What I'm most interested in is an especially Southern occurrence, where most people claim that  someone in their family had married a Cherokee woman. What is most intriguing about this is that people who belong to this group of people might report being either mostly Caucasian or mostly African-descent, but might belong to the Native American haplogroup.

        Anyway, I've been running around gathering materials, writing up the IRB proposal (which was a doozy), and researching things related to what I'm doing. I'm hoping that this provides an interesting learning experience, even if it really isn't a publication worthy study.

     Tomorrow, I'll explain in detail what I'm doing and publish the information for the DNA collection event that I'm having to recruit subjects. To all of those reading: Be a subject! Share your DNA!

-Alexandra Zeldenrust