Armoni Mayes

 

Hi, my name is Armoni Mayes and I am from Norfolk, Virginia. I graduated from Old Dominion University with a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences in 2021. Before attending Old Dominion, I attended a small community college for two years because I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do after graduating high school. After trying out a couple of different majors I finally settled on biology, because I had an amazing biology professor my sophomore year that made me fall in love with the subject. Once I transferred to Old Dominion, I continued on the biological sciences track but by the time graduation was coming around I still did not have any hands-on research experience which I would need in order to apply to PhD schools. I was recommended to apply to a PREP by a mentor at Old Dominion, and the University of Georgia’s PREP program was the perfect fit for what I was looking for as far as research areas. I ended up choosing to work in the Garfinkel Lab (Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), which works with a retrotransposon called Ty1 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (budding yeast). Ty1 is a class 1 transposable element that utilizes a copy-and-paste mechanism of replicating in the genome, and its life cycle is comparable to a retrovirus life cycle. My research project was focused on a functional loop in the n-terminus domain(NTD) of the Gag protein because the structure had recently been solved by collaborators of the Garfinkel lab. In comparison to closely related retroelements, such as Copia and Ty3, Ty1 had a considerably longer length of amino acids that make up this loop. This loop is dynamic with two different conformations, and it was of interest to investigate how the loop impacts Ty1 in its function and possible assembly. Mutations that deleted this functional loop were designed, with one mutation deleting the entire loop(M1) and a second mutation that only deleted a small portion of the loop(M2). Both of the mutants lost the ability to transpose, did not have detectable protease, reverse transcriptase and integrase protein levels, and also had an assembly defect. Being able to work in the Garfinkel lab taught me a myriad of biochemical techniques, writing, and technical skills that I will carry with me through my PhD and beyond. I applied and was accepted into the Microbiology and Immunology PhD program at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA.