April 2025: We have lots of great news to report!

Halle, Aysha, and Zeynep all produced some amazing data during their time in the lab and gave great thesis presentations to their peers.

Halle is headed for a Masters degree in Western University and we look forward to all the amazing things she is going to accomplish in the years ahead!

We are very excited that Aysha has agreed to stay in the lab and work on a Masters’ degree starting in September!

Alefiyah will join our lab as a PhD student in September via the Cell and Systems Biology program and continue the amazing work she has been doing!

Naiyara passed her PhD qualifying exam with flying colors!! Congratulations to her!! She is now a PhD candidate.

Paul Song who was a BioB98 student in the lab during 2025 Winter will work in the lab as a summer researcher. His stay is sponsored by the Center for Global Change Studies at the University of Toronto and the ExPOSE cluster.

Muskan, Ruoxuan, and Sekar, through directed research programs, all contributed some amazing work towards a genetic screen.

December 2024: To adapt to the rapidly changing climate, we need to create novel varieties of crops and wild plants. Although targeted gene editing will undoubtedly play a key role, it cannot be applied in every use case. Consequently,random mutagenesis remains an important tool in plant improvement and research. While single nucleotide mutations can be induced using chemicals in a lab setting, creating structural variations requires access to a radiation source. These sources may be difficult to access for many plant breeders. In collaboration with my former mentor Mary Gehring’s lab, we demonstrate that the cheap, widely available anti-cancer drug etoposide can induce structural variation. You can read about it at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.20.629831v1 .
You can see a small sample of visible mutant phenotypes that we generated:

September 2024: We and the Treanor Lab at UTSC are spearheading a multi-lab, inter-disciplinary effort to study the impacts of long-lived pollutants on animals, plants, and microbes. Our partners in this effort include the Anreiter, Mott, Simpson, Bell, Beaudoin, and Hui labs at the University of Toronto. We are grateful to UTSC for their generous three-year support through the “Clusters of Scholarly Prominence Program.”

May 2024: Aarushi Vardhan is selected for a University of Toronto Excellence Award. This allows her to work as a researcher in the lab over summer 2024.

March 2024: The lab is awarded the NSERC Discovery Grant.

January 2024: Alefiyah Bahrainwala joins as a lab tech!

December 2023: We get our lab space!

September 2023: Naiyara Ahsan joins the lab as the first grad student! We got to write a little perspective about and ingenious epigenetic clock devised by the Schmitz and Johannes Labs.