Samantha plays the piano and the violin and writes her own music. She also participates in soccer, basketball, and ice-skating. Academically, Samantha is interested in science, literature, and history. Her mentors are her parents, who are both scientists. She often discusses with them her opinions and ideas about scientific matters.
Samantha wanted to do a project that had never been done. Throughout her childhood, Samantha has visited her mother's and father's laboratories, so she was already familiar with the basic instrumentation. With the assistance of her father's colleagues and his lab, Samantha took on a project her father didn't have time for at his job as a researcher of infectious diseases at a biotech company. She became familiar with the background of her project and learned how to sequence plasmids in order to find out if mutations in a gene called Gag could affect the ability of HIV-1 to replicate and kill T cells.
In all, Samantha sequenced the 3' Gag gene from 12 isolates of HIV. She compared those sequences with 163 others that were already present in the lab's database and that exhibited a wide range of replication values. Once the sequences were recovered, she looked for mutations that were more commonly found in one group or the other. She found that the most significant correlations were seen between insertions in the PTAP motif of Gag and the higher replication values. Potentially these mutations may enable HIV to bud more efficiently by enhanced binding with a protein called Tsg101, thereby producing more viruses per infected cell. This may result in greater virulence.
