SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

SYSTEMIC REVIEW

Jill

WORDS BY MAXIM BUCKLEY

I was originally going to “interview” myself since I have to submit my thesis in the next few months and am pretty flat chat. So I chose Jill. Jill and I have been working in the same lab together for just under a year and we’ve been sitting with our backs to each other for about 6 months, not that I don’t like looking at Jill, it’s just how the lab is laid out.

Jill completed her Bachelor of Science in Biomedical science where she majored in biochemistry, microbiology, and immunology. Surprisingly though, science wasn’t Jill’s first attempt at uni. “So, I started a double degree in Economics and International Studies, did two years and thought stuff it, I’m going travelling for a year”. It’s funny that Jill started in that degree because it’s the same degree I started when I first came to Adelaide Uni and somehow, we’ve both wound up in the same lab. After Jill’s year abroad she came back and started science and seemingly has never looked back.

Jill is completing her PhD this year but, in what is turning into a consistent theme throughout this article, Jill didn’t start the process in a PhD. “So, you can either do honours, like you’re doing, get a good enough grade and then apply for a PhD scholarship. That will take you four years and the honours year will likely cut some time off your life due to stress. Otherwise, you can start the process of in a master’s degree by research. These are two years in length, and you have the opportunity of going into them straight from undergrad, if you have the grades of course. You also have the opportunity to upgrade to a PhD after 18 months and be paid the stipend for the entire time”. When I was in undergrad I had never heard about this process, I wasn’t even really aware of the honours to PhD route. It seems that whenever I talk to a Faculty of Science student, they are all going for

Since Jill is in the same lab as me, naturally she works on malaria parasites. Specifically, she works on Plasmodium falciparum, the strain that predominantly affects regions of Africa, and Plasmodium knowlesi, generally found in Southeast Asia. Jill also works on Plasmodium vivax, but only kind of.

“We currently haven’t found a way to stably culture vivax in the lab, but we still want to study it. Knowlesi has been adapted for lab culture so we use that as an analogue, and the way we do that is by forcing knowlesi to express vivax surface proteins”.

In short, Jill is a gene jockey. She uses DNA from what we call wild type lines, pretty much they’re lines of parasites that haven’t been modified, amplify certain portions, move around some DNA base pairs, add a little bit here, take a little bit away there, and voila. In all honesty, I don’t even fully understand what Jill does because we focus on different areas. I focus on microscopy; Jill focuses on gene editing. “In essence, we want to see what it does in a malaria parasite. If we knock down certain proteins and the parasite can no longer develop then we know there is a certain degree of essentiality to that protein, and possibly that could then be targeted by a drug or even a vaccine”.

Jill predominantly works on a group of proteins called merozoite surface proteins, or MSPs for short. There is a stack of these MSPs but essentially, they all help the parasite invade a red blood cell. The thought is that if one of these is essential to that process, if we target it then we can stop the parasite invading and break the cycle of replication. Unfortunately, science isn’t that easy. “I learnt to deal with negative data fairly early on. At first it feels really bad, you’ve dedicated all of your time to this one thing and when it doesn’t pan out it feels really bad! However, you quickly realise that A. you’re not the first scientist and you certainly won’t be the last scientist to experience failure, and B. you’re a cog in one great big machine. Your project may not work, but your supervisor has so many projects on the go at any one time that something will eventually work”.

Jill isn’t sure what’s next for her after her PhD. She knows for sure she wants to get a postdoctoral position, though she’s not sure where yet. For now, she’s just looking forward to heading over to America for a few months to hang out with her partner’s family.