Hi! I'm Dr. Janet Siefert, and I'm a molecular evolutionist at Rice University in Houston, Texas

In my work, I think about how microbes evolve. I do this using genes. (That 's the molecular part of my job-genes are molecules, which contain strings of special chemicals that define the characteristics of an organism.) Genes control EVERYTHING in a living organism. There are lots of gene strings deposited in special data "banks" that you can reach through the Internet. We produce a lot of these strings in my lab. I download these and then use computers to investigate and analyze them in many different ways. The tricky part is to think of very creative ways to analyze them. Once you do this, it can tell you a lot about how an organism changes as it adapts to its living conditions. This can help us look at how microbes might evolve on another planet.

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