UNC Charlotte
Undergraduate Research Opportunities for the Spring of 2026
We are currently accepting applications for undergraduate research experiences in the LaBella lab for the Spring of 2026.
Specifically, we are looking for students to engage in two projects (see below) as a part of the UR2PhD Program: https://cra.org/ur2phd/
Participation in the UR2PhD will come with a stipend dependent on experience and number of hours committed (maximum $2,000)
The UR2PhD also requires you to participate in the Research Training Course which meets Wednesdays from 8-10pm or Thursdays 7-9pm. You will also complete the associated requirements.
We may be able to accept undergraduate students through other mechanisms, but priority will be given to those able to participate in the UR2PhD Program.
The application includes:
- Background information
- Short description of research interest (less than 1000 characters)
- Short description of research experience (less than 1000 characters)
We will be interviewing candidates starting in November
APPLY HERE: https://forms.gle/a4My1dDvJbLDF1wG6
Modeling mRNA structure to understand biomolecular condensates
Mentor: Caroline West (PhD Student)
Project Description:
A lot of what we learn in introductory biology is only a small part of the actual story. We see a cell, and there’s the nucleus, mitochondria, golgi apparatus, all that stuff we have to memorize. Then there’s the cytoplasm which looks to be the soup the organelles live in. What the latest science is revealing is that the cytoplasm is actually a dynamic solution that has rules of its own. Within that soup, there are regions of different densities and droplets with their own composition. Think about oil droplets in water. Both are liquids, but within a cup of oil with water, there is clear separation between the two, and this is called liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), or biomolecular condensates. LLPS is still a new field of study, so there’s a lot we don’t know. We know the names of a lot of the condensates and generally what they do, but we are still missing the fundamentals of what affects how these droplets form.
The purpose of this project is to better understand LLPS, by looking at the two-dimensional structures of mRNAs found in condensates. Specifically, we are looking at how “silent” synonymous changes in mRNAs impact the formation of biomolecular condensates. The undergraduates on the project will choose one gene of interest and use UNIX commands to see how many variations in structure that gene can make. Then, the goal is to show the differences in those structural predictions, and how these structures can drive or impede biomolecular condensate formation.
Learn more about biomolecular condensates here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz9rxuVmFf0
Validation of an identified HGT in a yeast using phylogenetic methods
Mentor: Stevie Clemens (PhD Candidate)
Project Description:
Previous work on horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in yeasts inspired this project. They found that a bacterial operon was functional after being transferred into a yeast; this cross-domain transfer event proved the possibility of HGT events in a eukaryotic organism in yeasts. This particular transfer gave the yeast a key new function in high-iron environments, as is often the case, HGT events are maintained due to novel functionality. I wanted to take this previous research a step further and find out how common HGT events can be across an entire subphylum of eukaryotic organisms. This will unlock not only the level of HGT occurrence in a vast group of over 1154 species, but also which donors are donating these genes and what functionality they have in their donor and recipient.
As a part of this project, the mentee will be a part of novel findings of an HGT event, thought to be incredibly rare in eukaryotes, and validation. This project will use previously generated data to select a horizontally transferred gene with a high alien index value, indicating a strong likelihood of being a true HGT event, to validate using phylogenetic methods for presentation in an upcoming paper. This project will have the undergraduate mentee learn about HGT events and how we have been working to identify them using the HGTphylodetect pipeline. The mentee will also learn how to take a blast file and identify sequences for retrieval from NCBI. The use of blast files and NCBI sequences is fundamental to bioinformatics applications. The mentee will use phylogenetic methods in order to construct a gene tree using sequence data from NCBI and our own yeast sequences. The mentee will go through the process of tree construction and learn about this important tool for bioinformatics work. Tree construction is used in multiple applications, including taxonomic organization, ancestral reconstruction, and understanding gene evolution. Overall, the mentee will be instrumental in the validation of a new potential HGT event in a yeast using phylogenetic methods.
Learn more about horizontal gene transfer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiRc2FGh71o