The Relationship between Work Status and Grade Point Average

There is a fine line between wanting to succeed and being able to succeed. There are certain factors that one has imaged when the visions of success come along. These images include the wide range of having a good job, being able to provide for individual wants and needs, as well as continuing to have a social life. Being a student is reflected on these visions of success by how well one’s grade point average is maintained, along with his or her stress level of working and going to school, and even being able to sleep and still find time to use social media. We hypothesize that there is a negative relationship between the number of hours students work and their GPA. In order to test our hypothesis and understand more of how certain extraneous factors are combined with how individuals use their time, manage working and going to school, we conducted a study by using an online survey among current college students. We hoped that the results from our study could potentially help led us to understand how being a student and employee can have risk factors but can also have benefits. On the contrary, our results did not show a significant relationship between the number of hours worked and GPA. Even though we did not find a significant relationship between the number of hours worked and GPA, future research can repeat and improve our study in order to find out if there is a significant relationship between these two variables

Emerging Ruthenium-Glucose Complexes with Chemotherapeutic Potential and Inquiry into the Biochemical Mechanism of Action

Due to the severe toxicity of anticancer platinum complexes and acquired drug resistance, research has focused on arene ruthenium complexes as viable alternatives. Arene complexes of the formula [areneRu(µ2-L)Cl]2 and (areneRu)2(µ2-L)3+ (L = alkyl thiolate) are known to be cytotoxic with IC50 values in the micromolar and submicromolar ranges, respectively. Our goals are to investigate whether glucose ligands or hydrophobic ligands on cymene ruthenium complexes improve specificity for cancerous cells over normal cells. Reaction of the sodium salt of β-D-thioglucose with [cymeneCl2Ru]2 forms [(cymeneRu(µ2­-thioglucose)Cl]2 (1) and (cymeneRu)2(µ2-thioglucose)3+ (2). These compounds were successfully purified by HPLC and characterized by NMR spectroscopy. Toxicity of 1 has been investigated in vitro. Half-sandwich arene ruthenium complexes with hydrophobic N-heterocyclic ligands of the formula (arene)Ru(L)Cl2 have been synthesized where L= 4-phenyl pyridine, isoquinoline, benzimidazole, and CF3, and have been investigated and characterized spectroscopically

Assigning and Testing Function from Structure of Uncharacterized Proteins

In 2000, the National Institutes of Health initiated the Protein Structure Initiative as a multi-center structural biology program with “an initial goal to make the three-dimensional, atomic-level structures of most proteins easily obtainable from knowledge of their corresponding DNA sequences.” (NIGMS website). The third and final phase of this program concluded in 2015 with the publication and distribution of more than 5000 previously uncharacterized proteins. The work described here leverages the availability of high-quality structures and pre-cloned expression plasmids to combine forces of undergraduate biochemistry teaching lab courses across a diverse range of participating institutions. This consortium of undergraduate biochemistry faculty and students seeks to identify functional properties of a subset of these uncharacterized proteins, seeking to unify structure-and-function relationships. The current biochemistry laboratory class at Hope College has expressed and purified seven of these proteins, finding that structural information can guide, although not predict entirely, functional predictions regarding substrate specificity