Achievement

Sarah Wilson (ICE IGERT trainee, chemical engineering) is collaborating with members of the Biology and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology departments to metabolically engineer cells to overproduce the anti-cancer agent Taxol™. To advance the project, the team developed an Agrobacterium-mediated stable transformation technique for Taxus cell cultures. With support from an ICE IGERT Student Training Grant, Sarah traveled to the Van Eck lab at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University, where she received training on the Agrobacterium-mediated transformation technique and cell expression assays. By transferring these techniques to her UMass team, she advanced her own project while shaping the development of future projects in the lab.