Bitter Crab Disease (BCD)

Our cramped house was always filled with people. Due to her role in the refugee community, my mother would at times hold preventive workshops on HIV. The workshop mainly constituted of statistics display, stories, contraceptive distribution but mostly laughter. To the people attending, HIV was just another too familiar danger. I was not allowed to attend any of the workshops due to my age, but my perpetual inquisitive nature led me to the discovery of leftover brochures. While reading the graphic images intrigued me, but at the same time, I felt a deep sense of compassion for those who had to live on with the disease. At the age of 10, I wanted to understand which processes took place as a disease progressed. It was not until last year that …show more content…
Lopez on an individual research project. I was given the ability to formulate my own research proposal with the resources available. My interest in infectious disease led me to work on Bitter Crab Disease (BCD) in Tanner Crabs (Chionoecetes bairdi), an important economic sustenance in Alaska. The goal of the research was to construct a methodology using Real-Time PCR to amplify the 18S and ITS1 regions of a parasite in order to facilitate the distinction between diseased and non-diseased crabs. The research led to an unlikely conclusion as I discovered that a low amount of Hematodinium dinoflagellate sp., the parasite that causes the disease, was present at a low amount in non-diseased crabs, and that potentially another mechanism had to be involved in the development of the disease beside the presence or absence of parasite. Moving beyond my current findings, the future destination of my work is to arrive at a heat map that would depict potential evolutionary patterns between host and parasite. This research accentuated my interest in infectious disease and my aptitude to conduct research from hypothesis development to manuscript write …show more content…
Although my particular interest lies in applying CRISPR in the establishment of a more evolving immune response to HIV, I truly believe that working under a faculty member such as Dr. Kanki will allow me to understand how to approach and delineate the possible from the impossible for future research projects. I am particularly eager to comprehend Dr. Kanki’s interdisciplinary approach on HIV. Her collaborations in West Africa, the part that I grew up in, positively affected the accruing of information about this disease. The program will allow me to demonstrate a stronger trend in my ability to excel in my coursework by taking graduate level classes such as epidemiology and