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Dr. Sheila Macfie Wins Ferguson Award By Mitchell Zimmer Dr. Sheila Macfie has been working on phytoremediation, the ability of plants to decontaminate soils, for several years. Although she is accomplished in detailing how certain species of mustard plants are able to absorb poisonous metals such as cadmium, she lacked the funding to study the molecular biology behind the processes involved. Now that her lab has been awarded this year’s Malcolm and Ruth Ferguson Grant for Biological Research, Macfie can begin constructing cDNA libraries to find out which genes are responsible for cadmium tolerance in some species of plants.
The gene library will be contained in numerous tiny closed loops of DNA called plasmids inside bacteria. “Many bacteria are metal tolerant as are yeast,” says Macfie, “so I would expect them to be tolerant anyway. What I need to do is to use them to put [the DNA] into something that I know is sensitive and then recover tolerance. “ “Actually we have metal-sensitive mustard, Brassica napus, so if we can transform the Brassica napus with the cDNA library to see if we can get it to be more tolerant, then we know we have the plant gene” says Macfie. “It’s a long project; it’ll probably spend a Ph.D. graduate student career, but the Ferguson Award will enable me to do all the initial work and get it ready for the graduate student.” “Its very important seed money, it will enable me to get something out that proves that I have the tools I need.” In this respect, the award provides a fine foothold to begin this new avenue of research. Macfie adds, “Yes, its wonderful for that, I’m very thankful for that.” Dr. Malcolm and Ruth Ferguson established the $5,000 grant to support the research activities of a full time faculty member in biology. The award alternates annually between research in plant sciences and zoology. The award reflects Dr. Ferguson's wide-ranging interests in biological research. Throughout his career he studied a variety of topics including, the migration habits of starlings, schistosmiasis and common saprophytic fungi. He had earned his M.Sc. in Zoology at Western and went on to earn degrees in Parasitology, Pathology and Tropical Medicine in the United States in the 1930’s. After WWII he became interested in the use of film and other audiovisual media to demonstrate medical procedures. He and his wife Ruth endowed a number of awards to Western prior to his death in 1998. |
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Macfie is studying the mustard
species Brassica juncea that is known to be cadmium tolerant, “What
I plan to do is extract DNA from these plants under the conditions of cadmium
stress.” The DNA that is synthesized under these conditions will contain
the genes that enable the plant to tolerate cadmium. She says the next
step is to, “make what they call a library from that which is a collection
of snippets of DNA. The money from the award covers that.” 