Kasia Heller-Uszynska (Research Scientist)

E-mail: k.hellerDiversityArrays.com

I am molecular biologist who joined DArT in October 2004. I started with a project of Diversity Arrays Technology validation for sugarcane - a demanding species for molecular analysis due to its complex aneupolyploid genome. A year later DArT proved to work just fine for sugarcane, especially when a part of Saccharum officinarum component of the genome was pulled out by subtraction. Currently, we have now at our disposal, several effective methods of genome complexity reduction and detailed protocols for performing DArT in sugarcane. I used the best genome complexity reduction method to identify several hundred polymorphic loci, which I then successfully applied for sugarcane diversity analysis of cultivated materials and ancestral lines as well as for generating mapping data for the sugarcane PJ2 mapping population (view poster). I continue to work on sugarcane project with the challenge of developing a genotyping array comprising ten times more polymorphic markers than developed in the first year of the project.

In the meantime, the list of species I work on expanded with rye and oat with an objective to genotype both species with DArT markers. Yet another aspect of my activity is developing a method of an application of FTA Whatman technology for DArT genotyping.

I graduated with Master Degree in biology from University of Silesia, Poland, specializing in plant genetics and estimating impact of industrial pollutants upon genes and genotypes frequencies in barley populations for my Master thesis. I extended my education studying Applied Biology and Environmental Sciences in the University of Greenwich, Great Britain. My adventure with molecular biology started in Washington State University, USA, where as Associate in Research I was involved in plant telomere and telomerase research. The work completed there resulted in discovery that plants as their animal and fungal counterparts use the enzyme telomerase to compensate for telomere erosion (see abstract) and telomerase activity patterns in plants comply with that of animals in spite of fundamental differences in developmental patterns in both kingdoms (see abstract). I pursuit plant telomerase research in my PhD project carried out in the University of Warsaw, Poland and CAMBIA, Australia. My PhD project revealed complex splicing pattern of rice telomerase reverse transcriptase (see abstract) and developed a microarray based high throughput assay to quantitated telomerase activity (see abstract).