UC Riverside senior Axel Busch Castro has gotten a chance to dig deeper into the genetics behind plant growth through a competitive Howard Hughes Medical Institute-funded fellowship that complements his UCR research on drought resilient crops.
The paid, nine-week HHMI Cech Fellows Program places undergraduate researchers in participating laboratories, with students ranking the labs where they would most like to work. Busch Castro, a biology major who hopes to pursue a career in academic research, was selected for a summer placement at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York.
“This fellowship means a lot to me because I really want to pursue a career in academia,” Busch Castro said. “This allowed me to expand my horizons and visit one of the best labs in this field. It’s very different from what I do at UCR, and it’s pushing me further as a scientist.”
At UCR, Busch Castro conducts research in the laboratory of Distinguished Professor and geneticist Julia Bailey-Serres and works closely with mentor Adeel Zafar. His research focuses on how to increase drought tolerance in rice crops.
One challenge of crop research, Busch Castro said, is understanding how an individual discovery fits within the enormously complicated inner workings of an entire plant. A single gene can influence many processes, making it difficult to predict how changing one part might affect others.
“The whole plant is one big machine,” Busch Castro said. “You’re often looking only at one small cog.”
At Cold Spring Harbor, he is getting a broader view of that system by approaching plant biology from a different angle.
“At UCR I’m doing translational biology, which means thinking about how to apply what we know,” Busch Castro said. At Cold Spring Harbor, he said, the emphasis is more on asking fundamental questions and following them in new directions, even when there may not be an immediate practical application.
His summer research uses tomatoes to investigate gene regulation, which is the mechanism that helps determine when and how genes are activated. Although cells in an organism contain the same genetic instructions, not all cells use those instructions in the same way. Gene regulation helps explain how cells with identical or nearly identical proteins can develop different functions and how organisms respond to changes in their environment.
Understanding that process is important across biology. By learning more about how genes are switched on and off, scientists can better understand how organisms develop, how traits arise, and how those traits may change over generations. In plants, such fundamental knowledge can ultimately help researchers understand the genetic processes underlying characteristics important to crop plants.
Busch Castro is specifically examining non-coding regions of DNA that can help control gene activity. He is comparing sequences in tomato with those in Arabidopsis, a widely studied green plant used as a reference by researchers, to investigate how copies of genes and the mechanisms that control them have changed through evolution.
For Busch Castro, learning to ask those fundamental questions complements the more applied crop research he conducts at UCR, and is helping shape the scientist he hopes to become.
He credits Bailey-Serres and Zafar with fostering that development.
“The environment in the labs both at UCR and at Cold Springs Harbor encourage thinking and curiosity, and my projects just fuel my desire to continue,” Busch Castro said. “The things I’ve learned have helped me grow as a person as well as scientifically speaking.”
Born in Germany, Busch Castro spent much of his childhood in Vienna, Austria, before moving to San Diego. After graduating from UCR, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. and research career.
Busch Castro said the fellowship has also exposed him to both junior and senior researchers pursuing questions across a wide range of biological fields, broadening his perspective on science and his own future in it.
“I think there’s a misconception that science requires a lot of experience,” Busch Castro said. More important, he said, is the desire to learn and pursue questions that have yet to be answered.
“Curiosity is key. It is the main thing people are looking for,” he said. “Follow yours, and it will take you places.”