Zostera marina Thermal Tolerance 

I conducted research in collaboration with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, and the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. During peak heatwave seasons, I snorkeled to collect seagrass samples, which were later used for RNA extraction. The goal was to examine whether the expression of heat shock proteins (specifically hsp_70) increased with rising temperatures, indicating a role in thermal tolerance. Following qPCR analysis, our findings confirmed that hsp_70 is the primary gene responsible for regulating the thermal resilience of Zostera marina under high-temperature conditions.