The Sivaramakrishnan Lab is primarily interested in elucidating the mechanisms behind transcriptional regulation, and how cell differentiation occurs amongst multiple cells simulataneously. My project is focusing on how we can improve the efficiency of RNA Interference in our model organism C. elegans to better understand gene function. We are working with an improved vector in the field that has previously been shown to be of greater transcriptional efficiency due to bidirectional T7 terminator sequences. We are then interested in cloning candidate genes into the plasmid and transforming these DNA into bacteria to feed to the model organism to observe desired phenotypical outcomes using RNAi. Ultimately, our goal is to fill in the gaps and inaccuracies that are present in existing C. elegans RNAi libraries due to unintended off-target effects, to better remedy and characterize RNAi and the improved vector as a potent tool to study functional genomics.