Life Sciences Commons^™

Computational And Biochemical Approaches To Molecular Epidemiology, Michael Calhoun, Hannah Dysinger, David Hobbs, Ph.D., Katie Hailer, Ph.D.

2013 Undergraduate Research

Mining activity in Butte, Montana has taken place, or continues to take place, within the urban residence of Butte itself. This has led to urban areas with high concentrations of toxic metals such as arsenic, lead, copper, zinc, mercury and cadmium. Advances in protein study and gene sequencing has opened the possibility of finding molecular biomarkers whose presence, absence or morphological changes could indicate disease processes in populations exposed to environmental toxins. While in principle, biomarkers can be any chemicals or metabolites, as well as proteins and genes that are indicative of exposure to xenobiotics, this study seeks to identify …