Vera Sham

I am a Cameroonian with a BSc in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Buea, Cameroon and an MSc in Plant Science (Plant Pathology and Entomology) from Wageningen University, Netherlands. Before starting at ETH Zurich, I was a pre-doctoral student in The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich UK where I worked on a project involving high throughput gene cloning and molecular analysis to understand stripe rust fungus and wheat interaction.

My current project is a new project both to me and to the Bomblies lab but I find it quite fun and intriguing. This project in collaboration with the Zeeman’s lab (ETH Zurich) makes use of genetic (SNP analysis) and biochemistry assays to study the function of the ancestral and derived forms of proteins involved in starch granule genesis in Arabidopsis arenosa, a naturally occurring autotetraploid model species of Arabidopsis. In plants, starch, a major storage polysaccharide is stored in the form of starch granules. Till date, the molecular mechanism that results in starch granule genesis is still not completely elucidated. Recent studies have predicted five proteins to be involved in starch granule initiation. In polyploids, which arise from genome duplication there is evidence in some species that starch storage or metabolism might be altered. Furthermore, in a genome scan for polyploidy-associated selection in Arabidopsis arenosa, two interacting starch proteins out of these five proteins were found to be under positive selection. It will be interesting if I can correlate the evidence of positive selection to functional differences in starch granule distribution and starch granule initiation in general.