Yaw Kumi-Ansu is a recent graduate who majored in Biology. He was awarded a Spring 2018 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on Monarch butterflies under Dr. Jacobus de Roode.
I had my first taste of biological research in my introductory biology classes at Oxford College and my interest was built further in the research club established by the Biology department. This served as an avenue to discuss research from many different fields with Emory researchers and hopefully help us (students) identify labs or projects that may be of interest to us. It was at one of these meetings that I got the opportunity to meet Dr. Berry Brossi through a Skype meeting. I took an interest in his research into bee ecology and pollinator behavior due to the multidisciplinary approach of his work. Upon interviewing with him some weeks later to join the lab, I realized that though I had interest in his work, I preferred something more related to immunity and disease. Based on this, he recommended me to his colleagues, Dr. Jacobus de Roode and Dr. Nicole Gerardo, who currently serve as my co-advisers. In their lab, I have had the opportunity to study and investigate innate immune genes in monarch butterflies, particularly in the Toll pathway.
Monarchs are an emerging model organism and thus hold much potential for research outside the usual star players such as fruit flies and mice. One interesting thing about them is that they feed on milkweed during the larval stage and previous research suggests that this may be involved in clearance or resistance against their natural parasite. Severe infection can often prevent emergence from the pupal case during metamorphosis. Owing to the medicinal nature of this diet (as a suggested alternative form of defense against infection), I am interested in finding out if this has influenced the immune genes of monarch butterflies in different global populations. To achieve this, I employ bioinformatics tools to identify and compare sequences of immune genes that may have interesting trends relative to the background genome. This approach and hypothesis stems from studies that have identified arthropods that have lost genes for significant factors immune pathways, rendering them essentially inactive (in response to infection). One thing that ties some of these arthropods together is their reliance on their microbiome for extraction of nutrients and as such, may have unique adaptations to mediate interactions with their microbiome. This is particularly interesting considering the perceived universal importance of the innate immune pathways as a prominent non-selective defense mechanism in invertebrates.
Working on my thesis has been fun and rewarding but also challenging owing the difficulty in carrying over some knowledge from well-studied species to my relatively less probed monarchs. I greatly appreciate that my advisers and mentor give me a lot of room to propose and implement ideas towards strategies for my inquiry. I have received great guidance, especially from my mentor, in making the right assumptions and formulating hypotheses which would then appropriately drive the investigations. In a regular classroom setting, you learn how to answer ‘what’ and ‘when’ but in research, you learn and demonstrate how to answer ‘why’ and ‘how’. In such novel studies, the wrong assumptions or the over-statement of a conclusion can throw off the entire course of the inquiry. I often joke that my research is 90% hypothesizing and troubleshooting, but this is the case in most research and, in the end, even the smallest contribution to a new study could have a great impact soon. The goal is to ask the questions that matter, and hope that those will keep spurring on new inquiries.
Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Independent Research Grants.
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