Throughout my undergraduate degree, I have not had much lab experience, or experience with research. Many of my courses have been heavily theory-based, and have not had too many practical applications or have not taught me how to apply them in a research setting. However, I have always been interested in genetics, and when I learned about epigenetics, I was even more intrigued.

This year, I’ve had the privilege of working on my directed studies project on epigenetics, and I have been learning several different lab techniques that I have found interesting. I had originally planned on proposing an experiment to investigate whether certain replisome proteins (cmg Helicase, FACT, and Pol α) were necessary for maintaining epigenetic silencing through histone modifications. An article was published in October this year (partway through my project) that found that Pol α was indeed necessary for maintaining genetic silencing, and I had to modify my approach a little. It was still unclear how this process came about, so I decided to investigate further whether this has to do with the proper deposition of histone proteins following replication.

My question now became whether or not DNA POL α was responsible for the deposition of histones onto nascent DNA. I had learned how to perform MNase digestions on DNA to observe chromatin structure in my directed studies, and I figured it would be an appropriate technique to study whether or not POL α had an effect on nucleosome formation.