At the beginning of her first quarter at UC Santa Cruz, freshman biology student Kimberly Davis collected some soil from the forest floor near Thimann Labs. She then isolated a bacterial virus from the soil, took pictures of it with an electron microscope, extracted the virus’s DNA, sent it off for sequencing by the national laboratories’ Joint Genome Institute, and is now analyzing the DNA sequence and studying the virus’s genes.
The rest of the story can be found here.