Yup. Students edit genes at Gustavus.
Through CRISPR/Cas9 technology, Gustavus students are conducting critical future-focused agricultural research. CRISPR/Cas9 is a revolutionary gene-editing technology that took the scientific world by storm in 2012.
Just this past year, Biology professor Dr. Katherine Leehy was awarded a three-year National Science Foundation Grant for $322,925. With this award, Leehy is working with a team of Gustavus students, alumni, and faculty to help future proof agriculture against climate change using gene editing—and help high school students understand the fundamentals of this new technology and critically evaluate what they might read about or see in the media.
Their research will not only make an impact on a local scale but also a global one. They are using this technology to find ways to make plants more resistant to climate change, which will help decrease crop yield instability. “We hope to contribute to making crops that are better able to grow, survive, and produce yields reliably,” says Leehy. For all those science-minded people out there, this research looks specifically at the role of 20 newly identified small peptides that may impact plant growth and response to stress like heat or drought. “Our goal is to identify targets for crop improvement that will require minimal modification to the plant genome,” Leehy says. “Previous genetic modifications were like adding a digital cutout of someone into an original photo. New genetic modifications are more like tweaking the brightness or saturation of a photo. It's a smaller, targeted change.”
Another valuable part of this team is alumni Katie Lillemon ’24, who started her research career in the Leehy lab through the College’s First-Year Research Experience (FYRE). Since graduating, she has been working at Mayo Clinic as a Research Assistant. “The fact that this opportunity has been made available to so many Gusties is just awesome,” says Lillemon. While a student, Lillemon also did a summer at Mayo in the SURF program, applied for and won a Goldwater National Scholarship in 2023, then came back to Gustavus in the summer of 2023 to pursue her independent research. She has seen first hand the benefits of a Gustavus education, using skills learned in the Biology and Biomchemistry and Molecular Biology programs as a new technician in a lab just out of undergrad.
One of the current students on the team, Zainab Syed ’27, emphasizes how much she has learned with this opportunity, specifically the way the research gets carried out. “The information has been invaluable to me, and has come up in so many parts of my life,” she says, including collaborating with peers, imagining wide applications for scientific processes, and thinking about her own future.
In addition, part of the NSF grant includes the creation of a curriculum for high school students to help them understand gene editing and its implications on crops and climate change. Gabriella Bacigalupo ’25 plays an important role in this process and is passionate about filling the “gaps in the education system around biotechnology,” she says. Bacigalupo is co-writing a survey with fellow student Ellen Leach ‘25. This spring, she hopes to bring a CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing lab activity into her student teaching classroom at Mankato East and test a new, inexpensive laboratory kit for high school students.
The overall goals of this NSF-funded project are to discover where and how to edit plant genes to help the world better feed a growing population in the face of climate change, and to teach young minds about gene editing works, why it's important, and how to be informed citizens about it.
