Dr Susie Szakats hopes to spend her nights in tramping huts without being kept awake by rats scuttling through the roof all night long.
Susie has joined the Animal Biotechnology Team at AgResearch as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow to work a PredatorFree 2050 project.
Her research aims to investigate how a natural meiotic drive system could be applied to rats.
Rats are one of many invasive mammalian species that conservation efforts strive to eradicate in Aotearoa. Although current pest control strategies such as trapping and poisoning have their value, having a powerful genetic approach in our toolbox will enable us to eliminate pest species at a larger scale and in a more humane manner.
Developing new rat suppression technology could then help New Zealand towards achieving PF2050 rat eradication targets.
With much known about the rat genome, reproduction, behaviour and ecology, they are an ideal species to test out candidate genes for gene drive in the lab.
If we can confirm that the genetic components of the drive system are safe and effective in a rat population in containment, we take a huge step closer to developing genetic tools to help eliminate wild rat populations in New Zealand, as well as tempering the attitude of New Zealand public opinion and policy towards gene editing technologies.
Day-to-day, Susie does a combination of animal work, collecting fertilised eggs from rats and reimplanting them into surrogates once they have been gene edited, embryology work, injecting genes of interest into early embryos to modify their genes, and molecular biology, genotyping any offspring to determine whether the gene edit was successfully introduced.
The variety of disciplines incorporated into this role is something Susie particularly values, as is the potential utility that will come from this project.
Background
Susie completed a Bachelor of Biomedical Science (Hons) majoring in Reproduction, Genetics and Development, followed by a PhD at the University of Otago.
Her doctoral thesis was titled “Sex, Brains, & RNA: Origins of sex-biased gene and microRNA expression in the embryonic mouse brain”. Both her post-graduate and now her post-doctoral research projects centre on the nexus between genetics, reproduction and development, topics that she finds endlessly fascinating.
Areas of expertise:
• Developmental biology and embryology
• Transcriptomics and genomics
• Transgenic technologies