by Grace Kim
Editor's Note: This is the first article of a new series in which we highlight exiting synthetic biology research taking place in our communities in and around the City of Guelph.
Dr. Rebecca Shapiro is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Guelph. Her lab focuses on developing new CRISPR-based platforms to better understand the biology and pathogenesis of microbial fungal pathogens.
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Recently, I had the amazing opportunity to sit down with Dr. Shapiro and ask her a few questions about her research, synthetic biology, and more.
GK: How did you become involved in research and what do you enjoy most about your work?
RS: I’ve always been fairly interested in research - I started doing undergraduate research projects when I was in my third year of undergrad. I thought it was exciting to actually study the things you learned about in class, get your hands dirty, and answer the questions that have never been answered before. The thing I enjoy most about my job [at Guelph] is not having to do experimental research anymore. When I started, I thought doing experiments were awesome and liked it for a really long time. Now, I like directing the science and coming up with questions, such as coming up with a hypothesis and ways to test it.
GK: Tell us about a project you’re working on currently.
RS: In my lab, we’re interested in fungal pathogens and how they cause disease in different ways, their mechanisms of virulence that make them good pathogens, ways they become and remain resistant to antifungal drugs. We use different systems in the lab to address some of these questions. A lot of [these different molecular systems] are centered around new functional genomic technologies like CRISPR: genome editing that we can use to alter the basic genetics of these fungal pathogens, and then use those technologies to ask questions [like] “How does this alter their ability to cause disease, or resist antifungal drug treatment?”.
GK: What do you wish everyone knew about your research?
RS: Broadly what we study are fungal pathogens, and those tend to be pathogens that are fairly neglected by a lot of research initiatives and when you tell people that’s what you work on, people think of toenail fungus and don’t really know much about it (although toenail fungus is a real thing too, I won’t diminish the importance of toenail fungus!). But broadly, people don’t think about fungal pathogens very much. If you asked a person to name a pathogen that causes infectious disease, people think about malaria, TB, HIV, Staph, or Strep, which are all super important, but no one ever names a fungal pathogen amongst those. So I want people to know that fungi cause infections and are also super important. They’re becoming more prevalent and they become “superbugs”, the same way we talk about MRSA, or drug resistant bacterial pathogens. We have a lot of the same problems we see with bacterial pathogens, but not nearly as much research.
GK: How do you think synthetic biology has changed research?
RS: I think synthetic biology is an exciting field and allows us to address biological questions, some of which we have been thinking about for decades, and come up with new ways we can address some of these questions. It involves a lot of technology building and developing of genetic toolkits, things we didn’t have access to before and building these into bigger platforms that different labs can use for different applications. I like the idea that it’s sort of repurposing old ideas of how can we make “fitter” plants for agriculture, how can we make better detectors of antibiotic resistance, all of these questions that we've been asking for a long time but thinking of new ways to do it. So instead of traditional breeding for plants, how can we use cool targeted genome editing to make better crops. Instead of older techniques of making a diagnostic test for antibiotic resistance, how can we use some of the intrinsic traits that we know biologically about antibiotic resistance to make a biosensor that can detect it instead. SynBio is awesome!
GK: What advice would you give to people who want to pursue a career in scientific research?
RS: I think the key is to find something you find super exciting and you can be passionate about. Because research is very exciting, but [it] can be difficult, laborious, and frustrating. I think if you can look beyond the immediate thing that is frustrating you, and think about the bigger question which is something that excites you, then it will be worth it and you will keep going. If you’re just repeating the same PCR over and over a hundred times and it’s failing and you don’t care what the outcome of it is, then that’s never going to work, but if you can see past that and think “at the end of this, I’m going to have the answer to this interesting question or generate this cool new system that will accomplish something awesome”, then it will all be worth it.
GK: If you could have dinner with any scientist dead or alive who would it be and why?
RS: Oh, no that’s so hard! I need to think about that [...] my first instinct is to say Barbara McClintock, she’s the first person that comes to mind because I think it was recently the anniversary of her discoveries. She was a woman doing super awesome research at a time where there weren’t many women doing this (there still aren’t). Also she discovered transposons, which is so cool and crazy. It’s still revolutionary, but at the time it must’ve been so groundbreakingly revolutionary to think that could exist. She also studied such a bizarre system in maize and people probably thought she was crazy for studying that. There’s something about that that I think is sort of appealing...it would be a cool dinner, we’d eat corn, I guess!
Edited for clarity.
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