Saskatoon’s expertise in agricultural biotechnology extends beyond the University of Saskatchewan and the adjacent research cluster at Innovation Place.
For the second year in a row, a Saskatoon high school student has won a national biotechnology research competition.
Rui Song, a Grade 9 student at Walter Murray Collegiate Institute, won first prize in the Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge, an annual competition intended to raise awareness of biotechnology.
The 14-year-old is the youngest finalist in the event’s 17 year history.
She was attempting to find an early way to detect the difference between two strains of anthracnose, a deadly fungus that infects lentils.
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In 2009, Walter Murray student Scott Adams won the contest. He researched a novel way to turn off a wheat gene, altering its starch elements.
One of the two strains of anthracnose Song investigated infects lentils with low levels of resistance but does not cause problems for varieties with medium or high disease resistance.
The other strain infects all lentils, causing yield losses of up to 50 percent in a crop that generated $600 million in farm cash receipts for Saskatchewan farmers in 2008.
Song and her mentor, Sabine Banniza, associate professor at the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre, designed 2,000 genetic markers and tested 50 of them.
While they were unable to find a marker that could identify the two strains of the disease, the judges of the national competition were impressed with Song’s presentation, her knowledge of the subject matter and ability to answer their questions and awarded her the $5,000 prize.
Song said she will probably use the money to start a college fund.
She said the competition opened her eyes to a career in biotechnology.
“It made me realize science is not instantaneous,” said Song.
“Sometimes you don’t even come up with answers, you come up with more questions.”
Song isn’t committing herself to a career in agricultural biotechnology. She has many other interests, including math, reading and piano.
But working with Banniza and her team did stir up something inside of her.
“It definitely made science and biotechnology in general one of my top interests,” she said.
John McDougall, president of the National Research Council, which is a partner in the competition along with Sanofi-Aventis, Sanofi Pasteur Limited and BioTalent Canada, congratulated the youth participating in the event.
“We encourage you all to consider pursuing a career in science to push the frontiers of knowledge,” he told the students during the award ceremony.
