Emily Nowicki, The College of New Jersey

During this summer 2009 Emily Nowicki, a rising senior at The College of New Jersey, will join the Michael Lab at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology as an undergraduate BioMaPS RISE Summer undergrad. Emily will merge both bioinformatic tools with wet bench techniques in the Michael Lab to understand symbiotic relationships between plants and microbes. Emily will be working on a project to understand the microbial symbionts of the smallest, fastest growing flowering plant, Spirodela polyrhiza, which is commonly known as the Greater Duckweed. The Michael lab is currently studying duckweed as a potential biomas crop for marginal wastewater and a model non-grass monocot aquatic plant. The Michael lab has taken a metagenomics approach to understand the microbial communities associated with duckweeds with Next Generation high-throughput sequencing. Deep sequencing has revealed multiple microbes that are associated with duckweeds in sterile culture, one of which is a photosynthetic nitrogen fixing Bradyrhizobium. Emily will design experiments to further analyze the high-throughput sequencing, fully sequence isolated microbes, and confirm the relationship between the microbes and Spirodela polyrhiza.