TROY – A Troy University brother-sister team from Luverne have taken national honors from Beta Beta Beta, the National Biological Science Honor Society.

In Ki Cho was awarded the John C. Johnson Award for Excellence in Student Research while his sister Yoon Cho was awarded a second-place Johnson prize. Both are graduate students at TROY studying environmental analysis management.

The pair attended the national meeting, after having received awards at the organization’s past two regional conferences, said Dr. Christi Magrath, both faculty advisor for TROY and the pair’s research mentor.

Also attending the national conference were TROY students Pranjal Nahar, a graduate student from Pune, India majoring in environmental analysis management, and Robert McHugh, a senior cellular and molecular biology student from Hoover. Each of the four students presented their research to the national conference. The Troy University Foundation provided a $1,000 grant to help make the trip possible.

That research, Magrath said, was completed in the University’s Department of biological and Environmental Science and was partially funded by the National Science Foundation, the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching and a Faculty Development Grant. McHugh’s research project, co-advised by Dr. Alicia Whatley and Dr. Magrath, was “A putative cytochrome p450 mRNA induced by exposure to waste water treatment effluent in channel catfish. “Transcription termination capacity of intergenic regions from Saccharomyces cerevisiae” was presented by Nahar.

The winning projects were Ki Cho’s “Lead acetate exposed Saccharomyces cerevisiae – gene expression and growth of deletion strains” and Yoon’s “Northern Blot analysis of differentially induced transcription termination reporter genes.”

The national awards, however, weren’t the first for the Chos. They are the recipients of the past two regional John Johnson Awards. In Ki was the 2005-2006 recipient of the Troy University Biology Department Scholars Award and Yoon was the recipient of the 2005-2006 Troy University Beta Beta Beta Leadership and Scholarship Award.

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