Coming to study at UBC has been the first I’ve lived in BC since I was born on Vancouver Island. Soon after I was born, my family and I moved all over both Canada and the United States, spanning both coasts before I made the big jump to the UK to pursue my BSc in Biochemistry. My early interests were in yeast and mammalian systems, but my head was quickly turned after doing my honours thesis under Dr. Giles Johnson at the University of Manchester. There, I investigated how photosynthetic capacity, FUM2 accumulation, and overall cold acclimation varies among Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes.
My interest in plants was quickly sparked and in order to get even more hands on experience, I applied for and won a Plant Health Undergraduate Studentship under Dr. David Johnson. For the three months between my BSc and MSc, I spent my time digging around Trifolium repens and Trifolium pratense fields in Yorkshire Dales of North England. We wanted to determine whether clover experiencing herbivory were capable of affecting photosynthetic capacity in other clover plants that were connected via common mycorrhizal networks. We also investigated how these factors affected biomass, insect performance, nitrogen uptake, and CMN presence.
Afterwards, I wanted to learn more about how the innovative and still emerging field of Biotechnology could be applied to plant health and crop development. My MSc at the University of Edinburgh in Biotechnology allowed me both a varied and broad view of the diverse field as well as a more focused approach with one semester of applied research. My thesis focused on the effects of drought stress on transcriptional variation of an ABA pathway-related gene and root xylem/lignin morphology. This work with chickpea secondary cell walls led me to the Samuels lab at UBC for my second MSc in Botany.
I became apart of the Samuels lab January 2020 to try and satisfy my curiosity about the many questions surrounding secondary walls that came up during my previous thesis work. My current research focuses on how glycosyltransferases are recycled in the Golgi, specifically focusing on the xylan synthase complex. Currently, both the biosynthesis of xylan and the prevailing Golgi mechanistic model are incomplete. The current model for how the Golgi moves cargo from its cis to trans face is the cisternal maturation model. Here, each stack of the Golgi retains its cargo and moves from cis to trans like a conveyor belt before reaching the trans Golgi network where cargo can then be trafficked around the cell. However, recent data from Miranda Meents et al., 2019 (a previous PhD in the Samuels lab) shows that the enzymatic complex responsible for xylan synthesis – xylan synthase complex (XSC) – stays in the trans-medial cisternae of the Golgi stack. It is currently unknown how the XSC accomplished retrograde recycling. Therefore, the aim of this project is to answer the question: How do XSC proteins maintain their position within the cisternae of the Golgi and is this accomplished within or among Golgi stacks?
