Hellstrom gives students boom boxes to disassemble and study. Students are also introduced to scanning electronic microscopy as they examine the microstructure of the various boom box components with the microscope. In previous years, retention was about 25 percent. That's good news. The repair of DNA damage can now be studied with one-micron lateral resolution.
Radiation causes damage to DNA double-strands which the nucleus is sometimes able to repair.
Medical School Assistant Professor of Medical Genetics John Petrini , working with researchers Nelms and Rick Maser , used the technique to show special repair proteins at work, moving immediately from their home bases to remote gene damage sites. The new observation method opens up a wide range of possible experiments in cell damage and repair. A team of college faculty is working to create new classes of substrates for the growth of high-quality semiconductor thin films. The group is researching two parallel, complementary approaches. In the second approach, the growing material is seeded on poorer quality conventional material to establish the single crystal, and then laterally grown over glass, which again removes the mechanical constraints that normally lead to defect incorporation in the film.