Contributing to Published Research One Summer At a Time

Publishing a scientific paper can take some time; it is not just a matter of conducting an experiment – including devising a design and troubleshooting along the way – and generating results but also putting those results into context. It is also not a one person job, as many people can contribute to a single paper at the different steps along the way.

Two Amgen Scholars were able to see that process firsthand. Though they participated in their Amgen Scholars summer research six years apart, Amy Wolstenholme and Yoana Kicheva were co-authors on a recent paper, alongside their ETH Zürich advisor Elisa Dultz and her lab team. 

Published in the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell, the paper, led by grad student Janka Zsok, looked at key dynamics in nuclear pore complexes, a stable protein assembly in cells that mediates traffic between the nucleus and the cytoplasm. “It is the heart of many crucial processes in the cell and is a fascinating and beautiful cellular machine,” says Dultz, who is lecturer in the Institute of Biochemistry at ETH Zürich.

The publication highlights the importance of communication and collaboration, Wolstenholme says: “Even though I was only in the lab for a short time, we kept in touch periodically. It meant a lot to me that my supervisor [Dr. Dultz] checked in occasionally to see how I was doing. Then years after I was there, I ended up on the paper, and I was chuffed – I didn’t expect it at the time!”

Indeed, Wolstenholme’s role in the research project was early on. The researchers had been trying to get an assay to work, and it was Amy who identified a problem and that led to them switching out some codons so that the assay ultimately worked. “Amy did thus not collect any of the data that is part of the final paper but was crucial in developing the assay,” Dultz says. “Amy also won the poster prize at the Amgen Scholars [Europe Symposium] for her presentation of the project [pictured above], which she put together all by herself and incorporated a very unique design idea.”

Yoana Kicheva came to the lab at a much later stage of the project, Dultz explains, with her data part of one of the figures in the published paper. “She explored the role of one candidate protein and made some interesting observations that she also quantified with a pipeline she developed herself.”

Facilitating the involvement of undergraduate researchers in her lab is quite motivating to Dultz, who herself was a co-author on a paper to which she contributed during an undergraduate research project. “I strive to provide this experience also to my students whenever appropriate,” she says. Her lab has participated in the Amgen Scholars program since 2016.

Wolstenholme’s experience in Dultz’s lab in 2018 helped to build her confidence as a researcher, Wolstenholme says. “I always knew I enjoyed bench work, but I was anxious about the other parts of science – particularly networking. So having the courage to go abroad, participating in research and communicating with the other Scholars, and presenting my research, really helped me.”

Wolstenholme is completing her PhD work now with a goal of pursuing post-doctoral research abroad. It has not always been a smooth journey, with the COVID-19 pandemic interrupting work at the first lab at which she was pursuing her PhD, followed by the second lab closing abruptly before finding a third, and final, PhD lab at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge.

Like “most of the Amgen Scholars” Dultz has had in her lab, Wolstenholme and Kicheva “were extremely bright students with very high dedication, hard-working and quickly able to contribute meaningfully to the project.,” Dultz says. “They came with limited experience in the lab but very quickly caught on and became independent.” Both of them were sufficiently independent to push the projects forward, she says, even in Dultz’s absence at times in the summers. 

“The students benefit enormously from the experience and especially for students from less privileged countries this can be a door opener for future internships and applications,” Dultz concludes. “For me, this is really a big motivation to offer the students an authentic experience of lab research and provide them the opportunity to learn beyond what they get offered at their university.”