Student Scholars & Faculty Mentors
Projects funded by our internal grants program. Search the table to find students or faculty mentors that share in your interests, and could help you achieve your goals in research, creative activity, or service.
Comparison of 2 Primer Sets for a qPCR Assay for Powassan Virus
Name: Bhanot,
Advisor: Ryndock, Eric
Department: BIOL
Award: Student Research Grant
Abstract: Powassan virus is a tick-borne virus that can be transmitted amongst humans and other mammals. Although the virus typically presents with mild symptoms such as weakness, headaches, and nausea, its more severe forms can lead to neuroinvasive diseases and death. Due to environmental changes and increased detection mechanisms, reported Powassan viral infections in humans have recently increased drastically and are now considered an important public health issue. Our goal is to develop primers that, when compared to the primer developed by a previous researcher, should more effectively be able to detect the presence of Powassan virus. The objective is to determine the sensitivity of both primers to see which can detect the fewest amount of viral genomes in a sample. We hypothesize our developed primer will be more sensitive than the previously developed primer. We submit for your consideration a proposal to complete this validation within a timeline of months and a budget of $500.