April 2019Team MUTATE was created and formed. The members are connected with each other, as well as with their mentor, Dr. Stephanie Yarwood, and their librarian, Nedelina Tchangalova through the Gemstone program at the University of Maryland. The team is composed of a variety of majors, primarily in STEM-based fields, and is dedicated to finding a better method of developing flu vaccines.
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Spring 2020We continued to do background research in our field and started to develop a better sense of what our project was going to be, by focusing our research on different peptides that can be targeted by influenza vaccines. In addition, we started looking at methodology for the various techniques that we would need to successfully complete our project.
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Fall 2020Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to modify some of our research plans. Originally, this was going to be the semester where we began going into a lab and testing out various ways to grow antigens in plants, as well as testing different peptides and their effectiveness, but we were no longer able to do so. Instead, we decided to refocus our work onto writing a white paper that will give an overview of what we have gleaned in our research.
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TEAM MUTATE