Month/Year of Graduation

12-2017

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

Department

Bioinformatics & Computational Biology

First Advisor

Dr. Dhundy Kiran Bastola

Abstract

Artemisinin is an anti-malarial drug used in combination therapy to treat all malarial parasites in the blood stage. The expression of artemisinin within the plant Artemisia annua is only 1% of the dry weight. Methods for increasing the level of artemisinin within the plant were proposed. This paper looks into finding homologous enzymes across multiple species in order to find species where genetic manipulations will be useful. The second part of this paper looks at the use of osmotic stress to increase the reactive oxygen species in order to increase the amount of artemisinin within the plant. The database portion was successful in determining alternative species that genetic manipulation could be attempted on. The experimental portion was unable to shed light on the effects of a second reaction oxygen species on the production of artemisinin. However, the research did suggest that the level of artemisinin is increased during the recovery from stress.

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