We chat to Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Paige Erpf from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology at Macquarie University, who will be a panellist on this year’s National Science Quiz at The Capitol in Melbourne, also live-streamed online.
1. Tell us a little about your background and what brought you to Macquarie University.
I’m currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology at Macquarie, where I work on genetically engineering bacteria and yeast. I’m also a guest lecturer and tutor in the School of Natural Sciences, which is loads of fun as teaching is something I really enjoy. I started work here almost two years ago now, while Covid was still a pretty big thing, moving down from Queensland to live in the Blue Mountains when my partner took up a new role. I intended to look for work but unfortunately soon after we arrived, Sydney went into lockdown. A friend I had studied with, Alex, was doing his PhD in the Synthetic Biology lab at Macquarie and suggested I apply, which I eventually did, and I began work here in November 2021.
Before that, I completed my PhD at the University of Queensland where I spent about five years working on the human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans. It’s an opportunistic and potentially harmful little critter which normally just sits around in our lungs lying dormant – but if it finds a host with a compromised immune system it can spread, cause swelling in the brain and other complications, including death. My research was to help us find better drug targets so we can improve treatment options.
2. Tell us a bit about your research
I’ve now moved from quite a nasty fungus to a nice, friendly, non-pathogenic one, baker’s yeast; but the skill-set and techniques required to genetically engineer and manipulate the yeast are basically the same as I was applying in my PhD. Macquarie Uni is part of an international consortium of researchers building the genome of a synthetic form of brewer’s yeast. The project is known as ‘Yeast 2.0’ (or Sc2.0, from the scientific name Saccharomyces cerevisiae) - but my nickname for it is Frankenyeast, which I think is more creative.
This yeast species really likes to grow on sugar, which is how we can mass produce it – but humans also like to consume sugar, which means that the yeast competes with our own food sources. So we’re also looking at alternative ways to feed yeast, such as alternative sugars that aren’t heavily consumed by humans. We’re trying to develop a bacteria that produces these alternative sugars after consuming carbon dioxide. Then we’d feed these sugars to the yeast. This whole process has the potential to also indirectly reduce CO2 while also producing a feedstock for industrial yeast.
3. What drives you?
I am a people pleaser. I like to make people happy. If I’m asked to do something, I hate to say no, which is how I managed to get involved in the Sydney Comedy Festival’s Future Science Talks program earlier this year and found myself giving a ten-minute comedy routine in front of a live audience, something I had never done before. With a few other scientists, I went and had a workshop with a comedian and then off we went. But public speaking isn’t a problem for me, and I’m really passionate about science. So I went along and did it and it was great fun.
On the back of that, I’m now going to be a panelist in the National Science Quiz at the end of the month. There will be two teams of three, and we will get a science question and have 45 seconds to answer the question as a team. (I really hope someone else will take the physics questions or we are going to be in trouble.) The losing team at the end of the quiz will get slimed!
4. What does a typical week look like for you?
My weeks are super-variable. Sometimes I can be in the lab five days a week for six or seven hours at a stretch with just a break for lunch, and then there's other weeks where I’ll barely go in there at all. It depends on where the experiments are at, and what desk work I need to do. Like most things these days, biology involves a lot of computer time. To genetically engineer yeast strains, we need to figure out what we're doing "in silico,” meaning we build a plan on the computer before we go into the lab.
If our lab results show something's not working, then I’ll look at the in silico model and then the research literature to try and figure out an explanation and come up with a new plan. I am also currently supervising five students and need to make sure that they're on task, reviewing their assessment pieces and so on.
5. Any recent accomplishments you would like to share?
Teaching is something I really enjoy, I always wanted to include some teaching in my work. My teaching work is starting to pick up now. I’ve been doing some guest lecturing in a few different courses and I’ve got three more coming up this semester. I’m also supervising five students including two Masters of Research, a Masters of Biotech, a BPhil, and PACE student on a couple rotation, so that’s been a highlight for me.