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Dr Bridget Crampton, a senior biosciences researcher at the CSIR, was rewarded with two prestigious awards by her peers at a recent gathering of the South African Association of Botanists (SAAB). Crampton clinched a medal for the best plant-related PhD thesis in Africa and the best poster award for a poster resulting from her research in plant biotechnology and physiology.
Of importance to the judges were the three main research chapters in Crampton's 120-page thesis titled 'Elucidation of defence response mechanisms in pearl millet'. The first details her collaboration with students in bio-informatics at the University of Pretoria (UP) in creating a gene library using pearl millet. The researchers developed a method of screening the library to assess its worth. Two publications resulted from this work.
The second chapter focuses on early stage defence signalling in pearl millet where nitric oxide is one of the indicators. "Nitric oxide is one of the early defence molecules produced when a pathogen is recognised by the plant. I have done literature searches and it appears that my research was one of the first works of that kind to be conducted on a cereal crop," she explains, adding that she hopes to publish this work in the near future.
The final chapter looks at the role of salicylic acid involved in conferring tolerance to rust in pearl millet.
"I am honoured and more pleased about receiving this award than getting my PhD," says Crampton of her bronze medal award. In 2006 she completed four-and-a-half years of research, submitted her thesis and in that same year graduated with her PhD from the UP.
Last year the university selected her thesis as the best PhD thesis in her field and submitted this to the SAAB panel for evaluation. Her thesis will also become the foundation of future work as she pursues new research interests in the medicinal plant field.
"I am interested in medicinal plant tissue culture and investigating what's happing at the gene and enzyme levels of secondary metabolite production," she says. Crampton hopes to isolate genes from medicinal plants and transfer these to other plant systems like those of the tobacco plant with the aim of overproducing secondary metabolites.
"Many medicinal plants are quite rare because of being over farmed. I would like to investigate alternative methods of overproducing medicinally-active ingredients." This research, she says, could be of interest to pharmaceutical companies.
Source: CSIR e-News
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