Publishing research in one of the GSA Journals as an undergraduate is a significant and valuable authorship experience and we want to hear your story (even if it was published years ago!). GSA’s Spotlight on Undergraduate Research showcases GENETICS and G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics authors who were undergraduates when contributing to their paper.



Faiz Kabbinavar
Undergraduate Institution: University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute
Research Advisor: Dr.Kara Bernstein


How did you become involved in research?              

I became involved in this research when I joined Dr. Kara Bernstein’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in October 2011. I began research in my freshman year and continued through graduation, including summers where, in summer 2013, I was awarded the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Summer Undergraduate Research Award Fellowship. This fellowship allowed me to do much of the research that went into this paper in Genetics.

What was it like authoring and contributing to this paper?         

Contributing to this paper was an extremely exciting experience. I loved the work that I was doing and working with my other lab mates. Working together and collaborating with another University of Pittsburgh laboratory, we were able to learn much more, which made this paper all the more fun and intriguing.

What was the most interesting (or fun!) aspect of your time working on this project?  

The most interesting aspect of this paper was working with my fellow lab members, trying out new types of experiments. For instance, working on meiosis was something fairly new to my lab, so Stephen Godin and I worked together to characterize our proteins of interest. Moreover, it was also interesting to see the more intricate evolutionary data from Dr. Nathan Clark’s lab.

 


CITATION

Evolutionary and Functional Analysis of the Invariant SWIM Domain in the Conserved Shu2/SWS1 Protein Family from Saccharomyces cerevisiae to Homo sapiens Stephen K. Godin, Camille Meslin, Faiz KabbinavarDominique S. Bratton-PalmerChristina HornackMichael J. MihalevicKyle YoshidaMeghan SullivanNathan L. Clark, and Kara A. Bernstein. Genetics. April 2015 199:10231033