Amount of funding awarded
650.23
Budget Report
View budget report.
How the program has supported you
The PAF program has supported the wet lab endeavors of our project, which is essential to the team’s operational work and project success. Our yearly activities include the laboratory-based execution of an annual synthetic biology project, which this year revolved around the production of heat-resilient crops. As such, our wet lab activities included cellular plant work, which our lab does not have the reagents and facilities for. PAF funding was essential in purchasing the reagents necessary to establish a plant cell biology experimental system in our lab, without which we would not have been able to carry out our characterization and validation experiments.
Outcomes
The main research-based outcome was the validation of our plasmids in overexpressing genes meant to mitigate heat stress effects in plants, complemented with bioinformatic analysis of differentially expressed genes in heat conditions to confirm that our genes chosen to overexpress were affecting the genes in these differentially expressed heat stress pathways. UBC Engineering students benefitted from the outcomes of the projects through developing both self-initiated and team-based research skills, literature review and extracting useful information from it, laboratory-based skills, and software-based analysis skills. Opportunity to present at the iGEM Grand Jamboree at the end of the year as well as UBC MURC result in increased scientific communication skills in preparing slides visually and presenting orally on the short term, while networking opportunities from this offered long-term benefits. The successful completion of our sustainability-based project ensures students have benefitted from contributing to overall sustainability in research.
