Silja Vahtokari
My name is Silja Vahtokari and though I am originally from Helsinki Finland, I came to Scotland to study for an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Microbiology at the University of Strathclyde in the pursuit of a career in science that was international from the very get-go. During my studies and especially my final year project, I became excited with the idea of contributing to science as a whole, even if modestly so, and decided to pursue a PhD with my current primary supervisor Professor Paul Hoskisson at the University of Strathclyde and secondary supervisor Dr Lorena Fernández-Martínez at the University of Glasgow.
My work involves looking at secondary metabolite production in Streptomyces coelicolor, a model organism that derives its name from the strikingly blue coloured antibiotic, called actinorhodin, which it produces. We do this via a long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) in the vein of the Escherichia coli LTEE started by professor Richard Lenski at the University of California in the 1980s. Our experiment involves passaging six lineages of S. coelicolor, three in both rich and minimal media, every 72 hours and various phenotyping and sequencing at major timepoints. We are currently at around 4000 generations for each lineage with the goal of keeping the experiment going for as long as possible. In addition to general phenotyping of the LTEE lineages, I am also focusing on the pleiotropic regulator known as AdpA which mutates extremely quickly under our experimental conditions. We are hoping to use alleles identified in the LTEE in order to quantify epistatic interactions affecting secondary metabolite production. This will help us gain more information into the regulation of antibiotic production, and potentially allow us to use this to combat the ever-growing issue of antimicrobial resistance. In addition, of course, to helping us understand and gain more information about evolution itself.