Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Pooja Agarwal

Archaeal Transcription Factor Homology Search With Protein Classifiers

A novel transcription factor, which controls when genes are turned on and off, has been identified in archaea, a domain of species that eukaryotes like humans evolved from. I aim to find homologs, or proteins with a similar function in different species, of the portion of this transcription factor that binds to DNA and has a similar structure to a part of proteins in eukaryotes. To do this, I aim to use embeddings, or simpler representations of proteins with numbers, generated from protein classifiers like ESM and ProtCNN to determine whether a protein contains our DNA binding domain. Understanding this DNA binding domain better can help us understand the evolution of and eukaryotic gene regulation from archaeal machinery.

Message To Sponsor

I, and all the other fellows that are part of this cohort, have the opportunity to explore and dive further into our research because of your generous contribution. I have loved research, and this gives me the opportunity to pursue it full time over the summer with the eventual goal of attending graduate school. Thank you for your donation that is invaluable for our research progress.