62nd Annual STS (2002-2003)
Finalists
Bryan Armando Lemus

FLORIDA
Bryan Armando Lemus, 17, of Miami Lakes, researched a method for producing a population of mutant Arabidopsis thaliana deficient in an enzyme vital to the photosynthetic process for his Intel Science Talent Search project in botany. Creating a physically stable mutant plant population with no other mutations provides a way to decipher the enzyme's function. Through transgenic screening methods, Bryan developed a pooling scheme and used polymerase chain reaction methods to efficiently screen a population of 60,480 transgenic lines to isolate the enzyme-deficient mutant strain. He believes this methodology could provide a foundation for the creation of mutant populations for other genes of interest. Bryan attends Dr. Michael M. Krop High School in Miami where he is active in the math club, the Science Honor Society and the French Honor Society. He sings, plays trumpet and piano, and is currently a pianist with Fuente de Agua Viva, a church music group. The recipient of many awards for botany, including a first award in botany at the Intel ISEF, Bryan hopes to attend Harvard and study molecular genetics. He is the son of Freddy and Aura Lemus.