My  research was done under PhD candidate Clayton Cox and Dr. Max Teplitski in the Microbial Ecology lab at the Genetics and Cancer research center.  Basically, we try to teach γ-proteobacteria how to behave. 

This is done is by screening chemical libraries in an attempt to find inhibitors for a regulatory system that these pathogens used to initiate a cascade of physiological changes that result in the expression of behavioral traits (biofilm formation, stress response, SP-1 transcription) critical for enabling a bacteria to exhibit the deleterious behaviors of a pathogen.. The benefit in targetting this regulatory system (called GacS/GacA) is that while the regulator enables the bacteria to exhibit certain advantageous behaviors believed to be linked to colonization of a host and resistance to environmental insults such as host immune responses, the regulator is not necessary for a cell life cycle. Mutants lacking this regulator exhibit complete life cycles without expressing the traits controlled by this sytem. This type of treatment will theoretically enable us to reduce pathogen conatimation in common food vectors without placing the bacteria under environmental pressure to evolve around our treatment. These screens  may also help us locate the cognate signal GacS/GacA responds to, a signal that is currently unknown.                                                                                                                                                                                             

So why do research? First of all its completely awesome. The chance to get a scientific hypothesis with an unknown outcome and explore it with cutting edge research techniques is not an opportunity every undergraduate gets and its amazing. Secondly, you learn what research is really like on a day to day basis, picking up things that, hopefully, you will use you your future career. You meet amazing people and get to add amazing things to your CV. Joining this program has resulted in quite the extension to my CV. It no longer looks as barren as it once did!

The added experience not only gives you a nice CV, but it also gives you a neck up against the competition with things like grad school, med school, and even jobs out of college.