Growing up in the Philippine province of Aklan on the island of Panay, Clarina dela Cruz was always encouraged to learn by her doctor mother and engineer father. At age 12, dela Cruz qualified to move to Manila to attend the Philippines Science High School—a special school that trains students at an early age to excel in college-level science, math and engineering courses.
Dela Cruz’s already established love for learning propelled her into the program and eventually into a position as a neutron scattering researcher at DOE’s High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“In high school, I saw more because the school really exposes you,” said dela Cruz. “You’re from a little school on a little island and now you’re in the city with all the resources in your hands. That really opened up the world for me and I decided when I was 13 that I was going to get my Ph.D.”
At 16, dela Cruz graduated high school and enrolled at the National Institute of Physics at the University of the Philippines.
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Feature
Genomic variation is a feature of all natural populations and is vitally important in order to survive changes in their environments. Genetic variation among individuals, to which DNA recombination is an important contributor, is passed from parents to offspring and helps explain that different individuals in the population may harbor a diverse set of traits. Understanding and characterizing this variation requires both appropriate model organisms and a considerable amount of genomic sequencing capacity, on the scale of the capability of DOE's Joint Genome Institute.
Published the week of November 11, 2013, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), a group of researchers led by the DOE JGI completed a draft sequence of the monkeyflower (Mimulus guttatus) genome and identified the historic footprints of DNA recombination events that have shaped the development of this plant species over the last several hundred thousand years. By extension, these observations should inform new plant breeding strategies that could be vitally important to developing improved bioenergy plant feedstocks.
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See also…
James Bond used a laser beam to cut through windows and walls, but scientists with the Center for Advanced Energy Studies (CAES) at DOE's Idaho National Laboratory are using a new laser that can melt metal.
Sometimes big change comes from small beginnings. That’s especially true in the research of Anatoly Frenkel, a professor of physics at Yeshiva University, who is working with materials scientist Eric Stach and others at DOE's Brookhaven Lab to reinvent the way we use and produce energy by unlocking the potential of nanoparticles. Their aim is to develop a new “micro-reactor” to study how nanoparticles behave in catalysts—the “kick-starters” of chemical reactions that convert fuels to useable forms of energy and transform raw materials to industrial products.
Neutrinos are a great tool to learn more about the subatomic structure of matter and the nature of our universe. Results from the MiniBooNE experiment at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory now help scientists better understand the nuclear structure of protons and neutrons, explore the nature of neutrino oscillations and search for dark matter.
To determine if the common assumption – changes in specific messenger RNA (mRNA) levels are always accompanied by commensurate changes in the encoded proteins – is true, scientists at DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory examined Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 grown under steady state conditions at either 20% or 8.5% oxygen. Using a combination of quantitative proteomics and a next-generation sequencing technology, they generated high-confidence data on more than 1000 mRNA and protein pairs. Surprisingly, they found that changes in the expression of proteins in response to altered oxygen levels were caused primarily by differences in the translational efficiency of the mRNAs rather than changes in the mRNA levels.