The news that the Allied Genetics Conference 2020 (TAGC) had been canceled brought a moment of silence in the science community of the Genetics Society of America (GSA). Soon after, however, the community of GSA put an effort to hold its first online version of this important international research conference. TAGC 2020 Online, held from April 22 to 25, was a great success with participants nationwide as well as from other countries. In fact, it was reported that this conference garnered epic participation of over ten thousand researchers worldwide. Resilience may be an appropriate word to describe this. Coincidently, resilience has been a value shared by motivated students at Mercy College. This shared virtue between GSA scientists and Mercy students may explain the fact that four undergraduate students at Mercy were among the poster presenters at TAGC 2020 Online, along with other undergraduates, graduates, postdoctoral fellows, and scientists from prestigious colleges and universities.
If one happens to stop by the blog site of GSA, it may catch the eyes for the Victoria Finnerty Travel Award, which is to sponsor excellent undergraduate researchers to present their research at the Annual Drosophila Research Conference. This year, the annual Drosophila conference was part of TAGC together with the conferences of other genetic model organisms, such as yeast, zebrafish, and mice. For TAGC 2020, Mercy sophomore student Isabella was one of the fourteen 2020 Victoria Finnerty Travel Award recipients (http://genestogenomes.org/congratulations-2020-victoria-finnerty-travel-award-recipients/). Among the recipients of this prestigious award are the undergraduate students selected from colleges and universities nationwide, including the University of North Carolina, the University of Houston, and the University of California.
Does this honor come from resilience? Time goes back in the spring semester of 2019. Mercy junior student Patrick was taking an upper-level course called Genetics. It happened that the professor conducted a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) as the lab component. For this CURE, students needed to conduct an original research project that addressed the stability of chromosomes, especially the ends of chromosomes called telomeres, by studying unknown genes. The scientific curiosity grew in this minority student. By the end of the spring semester, Patrick was convinced to follow the professor to conduct research in the summer as a volunteer research student. For eight weeks of pleasant and productive time spend together with the professor and other volunteer students, Patrick was able to identify some candidate genes for further investigation on their potential to regulate the stability of telomeres, which might shed light on our understanding of cancer development in humans. The curiosity of science only grew stronger. Patrick decided to take the BIOL 370 Research in Biology I course to conduct experiments to answer his original scientific question in the fall semester of 2019.
This time, however, Patrick joined a research class of seven biology-major students: Sydney, Murad, Billy, Isabella, Chad, Allaysia, and him. Patrick found the class comfortable as he worked with Sydney and Murad together in the summer. The class was challenging with the failures of numerous experiments. The professor said that it was not a surprise since the research project was an original study and some of the experiments were usually done by graduate students. Furthermore, one might sense an atmosphere of competition. This was due to that each student had an individual mini-project and that the research progress, unfortunately, was reflected by the experimental results, which sometimes was either yes or no without a gray area. One might suspect a problematic scenario of the students. On the contrary, the students were encouraged and loved to work as a team to share ideas and to help each other, although they had to keep their own experiments moving forward. To the professor of this class, it was the biggest reward no matter the scientific experiments were successful or not. The motto, “Be competent,” “Earn respect,” “Be considerate,” and “Help others,” is the professor Dr. Zhou’s philosophy and visible on his laboratory website for students.
In this competitive and yet cooperative environment, Isabella grew to the capacity to conduct independent experiments to dissect the salivary glands of the larvae of common fruit flies called Drosophila. Unfortunately, until October 16, there was still no discovery for the whole team when they participated in the 52nd Annual MACUB Conference at Monmouth University in New Jersey, which was organized by the Metropolitan Association of College and University Biologists. A poster judge commented that the research was original and creative and hoped that the students could continue their experiments to achieve some findings. At the end of the conference, the students were cheerful for other students of other colleges and universities when they were announced for poster presentation awards. That might also be a moment to look at ourselves. How much work had we done? How hard had we performed?
Upon coming back from the MACUB conference, the students gave their best try for the remaining time of that semester, which was less than two months. It was until the end of November that the door of science was finally opened a bit for those hard-working students. Patrick, Billy, Sydney, and their teammates were able to demonstrate that two candidate genes that were identified in the past summer, when mutated, led to elongation of the telomeres, a breakthrough of this research project that started in the spring semester of 2018. At this moment, the students appreciated the beauty of scientific research—the ability to unravel the truth of natural phenomena. That moment could be lost had the students not been persistent and resilient. As an outcome that accompanies their hard work, Patrick was awarded the FASEB DREAM Mentored Poster/Platform Presenter Award from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), and Isabella won the Victoria Finnerty Travel Award. Billy, through this exciting journey, was convinced to pursue a research career and has now been accepted to the Integrated Biomedical Sciences Ph.D. program at Rush Medical College, Rush University, receiving a full scholarship for the 5-year program. Sydney successfully led the team platform presentation at the 9th annual Westchester Undergraduate Research Conference and is pursuing an interdisciplinary field that combines art and science. What they may not know is that behind their success, the Department of Natural Sciences and the Dean’s Office of the School of Health and Natural Sciences worked diligently and successfully managed to provide the required research equipment and space for the research courses to happen.