Young researcher of the month
Our Young Researcher of the month June is Jaynee Hart. Jaynee is currently a PhD student, working under the supervision of Professor John Christie.
About my PhD
The focus of my PhD is to use different engineering strategies to make the plant blue light photoreceptor phototropin-1 (phot1) more sensitive to light and propagate its signal longer. Light perception by phot1 causes plants to orient their organs to maximize light capture for photosynthesis, so a more sensitive phot1 could potentially have a large impact on biomass accumulation and other aspects of plant development. Primarily, I am making mutations within the main light-sensing domain of phot1 to stabilize the protein in its light signaling state. I am also looking for suppressors of phot1 activity using an ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) mutagenesis screen, which creates random point mutations throughout the genome and provides a large pool of mutants from which to search for a suppressor.
This PhD project is a natural progression from my undergraduate studies. I received my degree from the University of Florida in botany with a focus in molecular biology. I worked for several years there with Professor Kevin Folta, where I investigated red/far-red light responses in wild strawberry and kale. I was really excited by the work, so when I had the opportunity to continue on in photobiology in Glasgow, I jumped at the chance!
Recent highlights
This year has been especially exciting for me. I attended my first conference in January, and learned a lot of neat things and met some interesting people in my field. It was also stimulating to help organize the institute’s internal seminar series with a really great group of people. I was fortunate to have won the poster prize at the institute’s postgraduate symposium, and I was also recently published for the first time. I just solidified my plans for an internship I will be undertaking in Dallas, Texas in the fall to learn how to crystalize some of the mutants I have created in the lab so we can understand more about how the mutations impact signal propagation.
In my spare time...
In my free time, I do a lot of knitting, and I met a number of close friends through going to a knitting night once a week. I also volunteer for a couple of hours on the weekends by visiting with patients in long-term hospital care. When the weather is good, I really enjoy hiking and doing hill walks—that is absolutely my favorite part of living in Scotland!