Date of Award

1-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

College/School

College of Science and Mathematics

Department/Program

Biology

Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair

Carlos A. Molina

Committee Member

Jack Gaynor

Committee Member

Kevin Bilyk

Abstract

The jellyfish Clytia hemisphaerica has the potential to be used in cancer therapies with the discovery of potential active toxin target regions to be modified for use. The program Venomix is a Uniprot-based database that was utilized in this experiment to generate likely flagged hit regions using Clytia hemisphaerica CDS files run against its database of terrestrial toxins (Furuno et al., 2003; Macrander et al., 2018). By themselves they are indeterminate as to whether they are active toxin region hits (Macrander et al., 2018). With further analysis such as toxin homology in closely related, annotated marine taxa and accounting for multiple hit regions of likely toxin factors, it was attempted to discern which regions could have a conserved toxin function by flagging these areas as a protein probable toxin region (Macrander et al., 2018). By using the mCherry modified red fluorescent protein the goal was to observe a fluorescent red amongst transgenically modified jellyfish while administering artemia or an artemia coated glass rod to support the claim of the modified region being widely available for further toxin modifications. Through extra modifications of an identified probable toxin region after the confirmation of it being a true active toxin region the eventual future experiments would in theory be able to use Zebrafish as a model organism to grow melanoma tumors ready for testing in a Clytia hemisphaerica toxin tumor growth suppression experiment. The modifications that would be induced through the CRISPR Cas9 system would be a trial and error research approach to determine which transgenic toxin or toxin combination (if multiple target regions are available) could produce the best growth suppression against the standard Zebrafish melanoma tumors over a period of days, weeks, or other desired frame of interest.

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