Announcements of Opportunity

SURF: Announcements of Opportunity

Below are Announcements of Opportunity posted by Caltech faculty and JPL technical staff for the SURF program. Each AO indicates whether or not it is open to non-Caltech students. If an AO is NOT open to non-Caltech students, please DO NOT contact the mentor. Announcements of Opportunity are posted as they are received. Please check back regularly for new AO submissions!
Remember: This is just one way that you can go about identifying a suitable project and/or mentor. Click here for more tips on finding a mentor. Announcements for external summer programs are listed here.

*Students applying for JPL projects should complete a SURF@JPL application instead of a "regular" SURF application.
*Students pursuing opportunities at JPL must be U.S. citizens or U.S. permanent residents.

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Project:

Engineering plant-microbe interactions in the rhizosphere for a more sustainable agriculture

Disciplines:

Bioengineering, Biotechnology

Mentor:

Gözde Demirer, Assistant Professor, (CCE), gdemirer@caltech.edu

Mentor URL:

https://www.demirerlab.com/ (opens in new window)

Background:

The plants have a vast microbiome associated with their roots, which carry out both beneficial and pathogenic behaviors. Our overarching aim is to identify plant beneficial microbial communities under a given stress condition (phosphate starvation), elucidate the chemicals released by plants to recruit this microbiome, and genetically engineer plants to overexpress that chemical under stress condition to enrich and only recruit the beneficial microbes.

Description:

1. Pick agriculturally relevant plant stressor that can be simulated in lab
2. Create subsets of plant microbial communities, inoculate plants with different subsets of microbes, and test plant outcomes
3. Determine strain mixtures that result in best outcomes and determine exudate components those strains respond best to
4. Generate or order plant mutants that upregulate the secretion of those compounds
5. Test specificity of recruitment when whole microbial community is introduced:
Are desired strains recruited? And does this improve outcomes compared to wild type and whole community?

Student Requirements:

Molecular and cell biology, microbiology, gene editing skills will be useful but not required.

Programs:

This AO can be done under the following programs:

		Program	Available To
		Amgen Scholars	Non-Caltech students only
		SURF	Caltech students only

Click on a program name for program info and application requirements.

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