Profile

• Time Zone

  Pacific

  
  
• Organization

  Washington State University - Pullman

  
  
• Role

  Scientist Mentor: I will mentor teams of students online

  
  
• Research Interests (300 words)

  Plants, unlike us mammals, are able to synthesize vitamin B6. Vitamin B6 is an important part of more than 140 biochemical reactions, and can also be an antioxidant. Plants need two proteins, PDX1 and PDX2, to make vitamin B6. Members of my lab also study the ubiquitin proteosome pathway, or the "kiss of death" pathway, which marks proteins with ubiquitin and signals their degradation. I am interested in how two of the different forms of PDX1 are regulated, perhaps by the ubiquitin proteosome pathway.

  
  
• Profile Question 1

  When and why did you decide to go into a science career?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 1 here (300 words):

  In high school, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. My science teachers were really inspiring, and I decided it would be really cool to be a high school science teacher and try to inspire students like I was inspired. When I got to college, I realized I really enjoy doing research. To get the best of both worlds, my goal now is to become a college professor.

  
  
• Profile Question 2

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• Answer the question you selected for profile question 2 here (300 words):

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• Profile Question 3

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• Answer the question you selected for profile question 3 here (300 words):

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• Help represent the outreach efforts of your societies. Please click all those organizations you are a member of:

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• Availability

  I am NOT available, please temporarily remove me from the available mentor list

  
  
• Capacity: How many teams at a time are you comfortable working with?

  2

  
  

Recent Posts

Team 2 Marci Elizabeth Parra Dec 2, 2016

Hello! My name is Marci. I am a PhD student studying vitamin B₆ in plants. When I'm not in the lab, I like hiking, knitting, and binging on Netflix. 

I chose to work in science because I love learning new things. When doing…

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Hello! My name is Marci. I am a PhD student studying vitamin B₆ in plants. When I'm not in the lab, I like hiking, knitting, and binging on Netflix. 

I chose to work in science because I love learning new things. When doing research, I get to be curious and ask questions about how things are - and then go find the answers. There's so much we still don't know about biology! Eventually, I want to teach. I've had some amazing biology teachers that have inspired me, and it would be really cool to become that for future students.

I look forward to working with you all on this project! I see you have a research question. Great! Let me know if you have any questions about anything regarding your project, science in general, or anything really. 

Best,

Marci

PHSWC Rogers Fall P1G2 Marci Elizabeth Parra Oct 24, 2016

Hey everyone. I apologize for my late response, I had a busy week last week with a tough exam and to top if all off, I got sick. I have some suggestions for your conclusions.

You say "A claim we can make from our experiment is that…

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Hey everyone. I apologize for my late response, I had a busy week last week with a tough exam and to top if all off, I got sick. I have some suggestions for your conclusions.

You say "A claim we can make from our experiment is that terrestrial plants have a higher rate of photosynthesis than aquatic plants." - be careful here. You only tested two plants, so your conclusion should refer to two plants (e.g. this particular terrestrial plant has a higher rate of photosynthesis than this particular aquatic plant). It is hard to make such a broad, general statement about all plants when you only have two data points! 

Did you expose both plants to the same amount of light? If so, it wouldn't make sense for differences in light exposure to be the reason you found differences in the rate of photosynthesis. Did you know that there are different kinds of photosynthesis? Different plants can use different mechanisms to transform CO₂ and sunlight energy into O₂ and sugar. This might be a reason some plants are more efficient or faster at photosynthesis. 

Your ideas about potential future experiments are great, it would be really cool to find out how these plants behave in their natural environment!

Let me know if you have any questions or ideas you want to run past me. I should be online more often from now on. 

PHSWC Rogers Fall P1G2 Marci Elizabeth Parra Oct 24, 2016

Did the aquatic plant leaf discs rise to the top eventually? What were your methods?

There could be any number of reasons why the leaves didn't float. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the water might have been too low, (if the…

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Did the aquatic plant leaf discs rise to the top eventually? What were your methods?

There could be any number of reasons why the leaves didn't float. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the water might have been too low, (if the plant can't take up CO₂, photosynthesis can't occur). Perhaps the plant tissue was damaged or unhealthy.