GenerationResearch is a programme at the University of York established in 2021 that aims to widen access to summer studentship experiences for all students at University in the Yorkshire region. The programme provides paid practical, lab-based experience and career development opportunities to both undergraduate and Masters students across technical disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and engineering. The programme works hard throughout the year to secure funding for the projects, advertise them as widely as possible, and select the students based on an application and interview process which uses widening participation criteria to make the opportunity accessible to as many people as possible.

Novogene are delighted to be sponsoring one of the studentships this year in collaboration with Professor Katherine Denby at the Biology Department, a project that will investigate disease resistance genes in the Amaranthus plant, facilitated by Novogene’s RNA-seq and bioinformatic services.

The successful student, Tulsi Suchak, recently visited Novogene’s Cambridge Sequencing Centre and we caught up with her to see how things are going. She has been hard at work in the lab for the past 6 weeks and has made great progress.

“I got quite a lot of lab work done within the first couple of weeks. It had been some time since I was in the lab, so it was great to get back in and refresh some of those skills and see what goes on in a working lab compared to a student lab.”

Tulsi spent those first few weeks carrying out experiments to compare the differential expression of immunity-related genes in Amaranthus. The experiment batch was infected with the plant fungus Botrytis cinerea and the control was not. The RNA has now been extracted from these and is currently with Novogene for RNA sequencing!

While waiting for the RNA sequencing data to come back, Tulsi has been carrying out some bioinformatic analysis on available genomic data for Amaranthus, classifying the immunity proteins across the species and analysing whether any of them are linked or clustered. The RNA-seq data generated by Novogene will add to this knowledge and provide insight into the conditions that trigger different expression levels of these genes.

We are looking forward to keeping in touch with Tulsi and hearing about the discoveries made with analysis of the RNA sequencing data. Keep an eye on our social media for updates!