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    Tracing the Evolution of Shiitake Mushrooms
    Understanding Lentinula genomes and their evolution could provide strategies for converting plant waste into sugars for biofuel production. Additionally, these fungi play a role in the global carbon cycle.

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    2022 JGI-UC Merced interns (Thor Swift/Berkeley Lab)
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Home › Blog › JGI-UC Merced Interns Share Their 2021 Experiences

October 19, 2021

JGI-UC Merced Interns Share Their 2021 Experiences

During the summer of 2021, 13 interns from UC Merced spent eight weeks working virtually with JGI mentors to investigate rigorous research projects, hone science presentation skills, and participate in professional development enrichment activities.

For some students in the 2021 cohort, this was their first internship experience, while others further along in their academic career enjoyed the chance to develop new skills needed for their PhD research. And for the first time in this program’s history, two interns returned to re-engage with their mentors from the previous year and continue working on their research project!

The JGI-UC Merced internship program was founded in 2014 with the goal of inspiring students to embark on a career in genomics and to help foster a diverse future workforce in science. To learn more about each intern’s experience during their internship, check out their stories, told through print narratives, videos, a podcast episode, and presentations below.

Narratives

“Blurring the Line Between Plasmids and Phages“

Oscar Davalos, UC Merced Oscar Davalos

Mentor: Stephen Nayfach

“Polymorphisms Created by Transposable Elements“

Jacob Espinosa, UC Merced Jacob Espinosa

Mentors: Li Lei and
Virginia Scarlett

“Evolution of the Mitochondria Internship“

Jimmy Nunez, UC Merced Jimmy Nunez

Mentors: Frederik Schulz and Juan C. Villada

“Cross Species Integration of Single Cell Transcriptomes“

Lorenzo Scaturchio, UC Merced Lorenzo Scaturchio

Mentors: Margot Bezrutczyk and Ben Cole

Videos

Three of the interns presented at the 2021 JGI Annual Meeting – go here to watch them.

“Exploring and VisualizingP. hallii Mutant Library“
Beryl Arinda, UC Merced Beryl Arinda

Mentors: Matt Mingay
and Sharon Greenblum

“Evaluation of Binning Tools for Microbial Eukaryotes in Metagenomes“
Lucia Bazan-Williamson, UC Merced Lucia Bazan-Wiliamson

Mentors: Igor Grigoriev
and Asaf Salamov

“Functional exploration of Phage Impact on Microbial Root“

Cristian Espinosa, UC Merced Cristian Espinosa

Mentor: Jonelle Basso

“Cross Species Comparison of Plant Single-cell Transcriptomes of Rice and Arabidopsis Roots“

Maria Mendoza, UC Merced Maria Mendoza

Mentors: Margot Bezrutczyk
and Ben Cole

“Making Big Data Metagenomic Clustering Scalable“

Sean Saki, UC Merced Sean Saki

Mentors: Zhong Wang
and Bryce Foster

Genome Insider Episode

Check out the podcast episode, “Dispatches from the JGI Interns.”

“Cataloging Lineage Specific Conserved Genes in Giant Viruses“

Clarence Le, UC Merced Clarence Le

Mentor: Frederik Schulz

“Pan-genome Graphs: Approaches for Complete Categorization of Genomic Variations“

Rahul Ravi, UC Merced Rahul Ravi

Mentor: G. Albert Wu

Presentations

“Comparative and Functional
Genomic Analysis of Genus Roseovarius”

Sierra Roberts, UC Merced Sierra Roberts

Mentor: Shwetha Acharya

“Implementing a Scalable
JGI-RQC Pipeline on the Cloud”

Sandra Chacon, UC Merced Sandra Chacon

Mentors: Bryce Foster and Zhong Wang

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