Henry 9723623 This project provides minority students at Chicago State University with opportunities to participate in current research projects at the University of Chicago. The goal is to instruct students in specific areas of genetics to the level that they will be competent to conduct a research project, to guide them to achieve success in their work and to experience the excitement in current genetic biology. Students should come to feel comfortable and confident at a major research university. The experience should stimulate students to consider and to explore careers in the biological sciences. The projects should help students, through their research archievements, to build the necessary self-confidence to enter a graduate degree program. To this end, students will participate in the research on the genetic and molecular evidence of polymorphisms in fungi. The specific organism for this purpose is the anther-smut fungus Microbotryum violaceum. The choice of this species is predicted by ongoing research in the Principal and Co-principal Investigators' laboratories. They have familiarity and long experience with the species. Background work is expected to lead to experiments that challenge students to engage in hands-on and minds-on experience. All projects are selected to provide students with real, rather than contrived, problems. The six projects on transmission gentics focus on testing the hypothesis that the highly mutable loci in M. violaceum may be explained by assuming the activity of a transposible element (TE). Polymorphism in colony color and auxotrophy were selected because the relative ease in experimental manipulation and the accumulation of appropriate collections. Polymorphisms detected by RAPDs is the basis for two projects that may provide molecular markers for the detection of linkage with color, morphology, nutritional requirement and mating type loci. The result of these experiments will also provide information to construct a physical map of the M. vio lacum and other Ustilaginales. It could yield a map of the mitochondrial genome and provide important information on the phylogenetic relatedness between and among the fungi that infect dicot and monocot plants.
