When ACC comes to mind, some people immediately think of athletic exhibitions and conference championships. However, some students at N.C. State and the other ACC schools are giving these people a reason to think otherwise.

The ACCIAC Undergraduate Fellows Program in Creativity and Innovation is a program established to highlight student-driven discovery and accomplishment at ACC universities by awarding them grants to conduct research in their field of interest.

This year two students from N.C. State were among the recipients of the grants.

Mary Pat Bulfin, a sophomore in animal science, is one of these students.

Although the program bears the name of the ACC, one of college sports most widely known athletic conferences, the program itself has nothing to do with athletics as Bulfin explained.

“It started with the ACC – its 12 global universities on the Atlantic coast. They were originally brought together for athletics but then they realized that because some of their core values are innovation and creativity, they wanted to place a good emphasis on academics,” Bulfin said.

For this reason, the ACCIAC Fellows Program was launched.

“They have created this program for undergraduate students to pursue something they are passionate about, be it something artistic or something research related, and you can do it as a team initiative or an individual initiative.”

Joining Bulfin as a recipient is David Higgins, a junior in plant biology, whose research will center around plant cells and the long term potential of plants to become more drought tolerant.

“The nature of my project involves protein-protein interaction in plant cells. What we’re working towards is understanding how a single transduction pathway works, which is involved in the regulation of drought stress in plant cells,” Higgins said.

Higgins said his particular part of the project involves a specific pathway called the phosphoinosipide pathway.

“This pathway hasn’t really been researched too much in detail, particularly the part that I’m studying, which is the regulation of it. It’s innovative in that I’m one of the first ones to look at it,” Higgins said. “I’m also using an innovative technique to study it which hasn’t really been studied in other labs before, or even our lab. So I’m using new techniques to study a new part of the pathway.

Bulfin, however, said her research focuses in on the field of poultry genomics.

“It’s actually called nutrigenomics and it examines how diet relates to genetic profiles. So it’s how what is consumed by the animal or person affects how genes are expressed in the body,” Bulfin said. “I found out about this just reading a magazine and I asked one of my professors if anyone on campus was doing this research, then this ACCIAC opportunity came about and I said ‘Wait, I’m going to put these puzzle pieces together.'”

While in Georgia during part of the past spring semester, Bulfin visited Danisco Animal Nutrition, the company providing chickens with the 10 different treatments she is studying.

“I just took samples from the intestines – so we’re actually working with the tissue- and we’re preparing them for RNA extraction. That’s as far as we’ve gotten. It’s a repetitive process, there are 160 samples and I just did the first four. We’re preparing to extract the RNA and we’ll eventually be looking at gene expression,” Bulfin said.

The goal in nutrigenomics, Bulfin said, is to devise diets that suppress destructive genes.

“The components that make up the nutrients in your diet are interacting somehow physiologically in your body and it turns on – I’m not sure exactly what ‘turning on’ means, but it just means that that gene is exposed and is reacting in your body. Like, antioxidants can cause genes to turn on and turn off in your body and it just means which ones are acting and involved,” Bulfin said.

Because of the ACCIAC program, Bulfin will be able to extend upon all of this.

“[It] provides the financial means for students to find their passion, go discover, and learn how this knowledge can be used to serve their world,” Bulfin said.

In addition, Higgins said he believes that this opportunity will give him a leg up on the competition in the future.

“It’s a good opportunity to get research in, which is important for the science field and being an undergrad who is looking to pursue a science career,” Higgins said. “Research is one of the top criteria that grad school is looking for. So research like this makes my application more competitive.”