Two St. Bonaventure University seniors earned poster awards for their research and presentations at the annual Rustbelt RNA meeting held virtually Oct. 23 and Oct. 24.

Biochemistry major Anna Hu and biology major Audrey Bui won Excellent Undergraduate Poster awards.

“They really impressed the judges by their excellent work and clear articulation during the presentation,” said Dr. Xiao-Ning Zhang, director of the university’s biochemistry program.

Also attending the meeting from St. Bonaventure were fellow undergraduate researchers biochemistry majors Claire Schaef, a junior, and Arden Bui, a sophomore.

“COVID-19 has made research more challenging worldwide, but our students achieved high marks as academic scholars regardless of the difficulties,” said Zhang.

In Hu’s work, titled “Looking into the internal coordination within the ASAP complex for gene regulation in Arabidopsis,” she is primarily interested in gaining a better understanding of how proteins communicate with each other in their teamwork to achieve an overall fitness for the organism, in this case, specifically SAP18 and its protein partners in the ASAP complex.

Hu, who is from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, said, “Understanding this may help us get one step closer to piecing together the different strategies plants use in growth and development (for example, in flowering), defense response, and innate immunity.”

Bui’s research project title is “The Role of Serine Arginine-rich 45 Alternatively Spliced Isoforms in Innate Immunity in Arabidopsis thaliana.”

In the past 10 years, Zhang’s lab and other scientists have established that SR45 is an important regulator that processes the transcribed genetic codes from DNA.

“It is very interesting,” Zhang said, “that the SR45 gene can be made into two different protein isoforms: SR45.1 and SR45.2.”

Bui is researching the role of these two isoforms in plant innate immunity.

“We are investigating if one isoform is specifically responsible for suppressing plant innate immunity as well as investigating which hormone pathways might be involved in this process,” said Bui, who is from San Jose, California.

The Rustbelt RNA meeting is a regional scientific meeting that gathers scientists from throughout the Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic United States to discuss RNA-related biomedical research. The meeting predominately features oral and poster presentations by undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral trainees.

This year, Zhang said, the meeting was filled with cutting-edge topics in RNA research, such as SARS-CoV2 that cause COVID-19. There was a keynote address from Rachel Green, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, as well as a panel discussion on solutions for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in science.

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About the University: The nation’s first Franciscan university, St. Bonaventure University is a community committed to transforming the lives of our students inside and outside the classroom, inspiring in them a lifelong commitment to service and citizenship. In 2020, St. Bonaventure was named the #2 regional university value in New York and #3 in the North by U.S. News and World Report.