Tanja Ingram-Paquette

tanja.ingrampaquette@sunmedia.ca

Wesley Janzen will definitely not forget her last year at the University of Western Ontario considering her golf team made it to the college and university championships in British Columbia last month. At the same time, she was honoured to be involved with the publication of some scientific research.

"I just finished up my fourth and final year of my program and graduated with a Bachelor of Medical Science, Honours in Biochemistry and Major in Pharmacology," said Ms Janzen. "The paper was pretty much a stroke of luck for me...I've been working in a

Biochemistry laboratory for the past few years under the supervision of Dr. David Edgell.

He is a professor at Western and he has a lab with a few graduate students working for him. I started working there during the summer of 2010. At the time, I just wanted to try out research and see if I liked it and if I might want to pursue graduate studies in Biochemistry after my undergraduate studies. I did like it very much, so I continued to work there part time during the 2010-2011 academic year. It was during this time that results from the research I was doing were included in a paper that was published in the online scientific journal, PLoS ONE."

Ms Janzen added that the details of her research are very science-specific and are difficult to explain in layman's terms. Basically, she was working with a protein (I-BmoI) that cleaves (cuts) strands of DNA at a specific sequence, and was trying to modify the DNA sequence to see what changes were tolerated and still allowed cleavage by this protein.

The publication can be viewed for free online: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023804.

"The paper consists of a lot more than just my research. I was second author on the paper, so most of the data in the paper was not mine," explained Ms Janzen. "Most of the data was Ben Kleinstiver's, he's a PhD student in Dr. Edgell's lab and he was the first author on the paper. It's still really exciting that I was able to get my name on a publication though, since not many undergraduate students have this opportunity. I was just lucky enough to have been given this opportunity, so it was a bit lucky. I kept working in Dr. Edgell's lab during the 2011-2012 academic year, since I had to complete a research-based thesis project and he agreed to supervise me for this as well."

Next month Ms Janzen will be starting her Master's in Science (Biochemistry) at Western, doing her research project in Dr. Caroline Schild-Poulter's lab.