For my first biology class at my college during the pandemic, I was fortunate to be in a class taught by a professor who had spent the majority of her professional career working on SARS viruses. This project gave me an opportunity to learn about MRNA vaccine design. Through the course of the project I got familiar with working using the genome databases provided by NIH and comparing proteins sequences for different SARS viruses. Using these comparisons, we selected a protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus to focus our theoretical vaccine on, in my group's case, the membrane protein as we saw that it was different from other SARS viruses and didn't change substantially over the mutations that had occurred up to the time of our project. Using the M protein, we designed a fragment that could theoretically be introduced into E.coli for replication. This project helped give me overall knowledge in DNA expression and sequencing, protein composition and sequencing, and vectors. It also gave me another opportunity to grow in my ability to work in a team and write a research paper. As it was a journal-based research project, it also gave me more skill and proficiency in literary search based research and I became more confident in my ability to find and refine sources and background research for future projects. The project was built up over a series of lab documents each designed to focus on one aspect of the project. There was not a traditional final submission but each document acted as both a record and a summary of the project up until that point. These executive summary style documents helped pave the way for future executive summaries and helped me develop a slightly more concise writing style. Shown below is one part of the collection of lab documents.