Senior Anika Mootha painted the cover art for the Nucleic Acid Therapeutics magazine. Even though Mootha does not have a lot of experience with painting, she says she enjoyed the experience.
“I’m very much a beginner,” said Mootha. “[US/MS Visual Arts teacher Lesley] Rucker gave me a lot of guidance and I decided to do a watercolor piece because that is what I am most familiar with.”
After working in the Science Teachers Access to Resources at Southwestern program in a UT Southwestern Medical Center lab all summer, Mootha was matched up with mentors and given a project collecting data. Her mentors recommended her to create the cover art for the Nucleic Acid Therapeutics magazine.
“The lab actually reached out to me saying that they had an opportunity to provide art that would be on the cover of the journal,” said Mootha. “I feel super lucky.”
In the cover art, Mootha wanted to paint gapmers. Gapmers are short DNA molecules used to block or turn off specific genes for research or treatment purposes.
“I painted an eye, specifically a rat’s eye,” said Mootha. “I wanted to depict something called gapmers which are used in the process of developing the therapies and so after I came up with a draft and I sent it to [the magazine] and they liked it a lot.”
