Jhanelle D. Francis
Lab affiliation: Uyaguari-Diaz Lab
Degree(s) you hold: Honour Bachelor of Science
Degree being sought: Master of Science
Hometown: Kingston, Jamaica born and raised.
Research project: Virome distribution of aquatic ecosystems impacted by anthropogenic activities.
A picture of you:
Lab affiliation: Uyaguari-Diaz Lab
Degree(s) you hold: Honour Bachelor of Science
Degree being sought: Master of Science
Hometown: Kingston, Jamaica born and raised.
Research project: Virome distribution of aquatic ecosystems impacted by anthropogenic activities.
A picture of you:
What do you do to relax when you have a lazy day at home?
As a graduate student, there is never really a lazy day at home. But when needed, I do enjoy pouring myself a glass of wine and turning on my speaker to listen to relaxing and meditating music. Other times may include watching my favourite Netflix series (Squid Games and How I met your mother) in bed until I fall asleep.
What are you most excited about for 2022? Goals?
My biggest goal for 2022 is to graduate towards the end of the year and pursue my PhD degree.
What techniques do you/will you most often use in your project?
My project involves a combination of wet lab and dry lab techniques. For wet lab, I perform serial vacuum filtrations followed by skimmed milk flocculation techniques, DNAase/RNAse treatments, nucleic acid extraction and quantitative PCR (qPCR) to identify enteric viruses. Statistical analyses is conducted through two main approaches:
-Culture independent approach: oxplots in gene copy number/mL to compare across sample locations.
-Metagenomic Approach: : Geneious workflow commercial software used to pre-process the raw sequenced reads. Data visualizations include PCA plots, heatmaps and bar plots of processed sequenced reads to identify the most common enteric viruses present.
What's one silly mistake you've made in the lab?
After performing qPCR analysis on some of my samples, I noticed that the results were faulty. When I looked into it, I realized I had inputted the incorrect settings into the QuantStudio systems platform. In an effort to avoid having to prepare a new batch of samples for qPCR analyses, I thought it may be easier to repeat the analyses on the samples that had just been run! Ultimately the silliest mistake of them all because once any sample undergoes qPCR, the polymerase and primers all become denatured and cannot be reused.
What are any current problems you are having with your research?
Thankfully I do not have any major current problems or obstacles with my research. There are a few minor obstacles yes, but it is all a part of the learning curve.
What did you hope to get out of grad school in the beginning compared to now? Or (if you’ve just begun) what are you looking forward to?
When I just started graduate school, I hoped to get as much research experience as possible beyond what is required of me as a grad student. I have since achieved this goal because within my first year as a MSc student, I was a 3MT finalist 2020-2021, participated in ComSciConCAN 2021 poster competition, completed an external internship with Dr. Meaghan Jones to gain bio-informatic research, a TA for MBIO 1010/2020 courses, and I was featured in UM Today Story as well as local CTV news. I look forward to achieving even more accomplishments this academic year!
As a graduate student, there is never really a lazy day at home. But when needed, I do enjoy pouring myself a glass of wine and turning on my speaker to listen to relaxing and meditating music. Other times may include watching my favourite Netflix series (Squid Games and How I met your mother) in bed until I fall asleep.
What are you most excited about for 2022? Goals?
My biggest goal for 2022 is to graduate towards the end of the year and pursue my PhD degree.
What techniques do you/will you most often use in your project?
My project involves a combination of wet lab and dry lab techniques. For wet lab, I perform serial vacuum filtrations followed by skimmed milk flocculation techniques, DNAase/RNAse treatments, nucleic acid extraction and quantitative PCR (qPCR) to identify enteric viruses. Statistical analyses is conducted through two main approaches:
-Culture independent approach: oxplots in gene copy number/mL to compare across sample locations.
-Metagenomic Approach: : Geneious workflow commercial software used to pre-process the raw sequenced reads. Data visualizations include PCA plots, heatmaps and bar plots of processed sequenced reads to identify the most common enteric viruses present.
What's one silly mistake you've made in the lab?
After performing qPCR analysis on some of my samples, I noticed that the results were faulty. When I looked into it, I realized I had inputted the incorrect settings into the QuantStudio systems platform. In an effort to avoid having to prepare a new batch of samples for qPCR analyses, I thought it may be easier to repeat the analyses on the samples that had just been run! Ultimately the silliest mistake of them all because once any sample undergoes qPCR, the polymerase and primers all become denatured and cannot be reused.
What are any current problems you are having with your research?
Thankfully I do not have any major current problems or obstacles with my research. There are a few minor obstacles yes, but it is all a part of the learning curve.
What did you hope to get out of grad school in the beginning compared to now? Or (if you’ve just begun) what are you looking forward to?
When I just started graduate school, I hoped to get as much research experience as possible beyond what is required of me as a grad student. I have since achieved this goal because within my first year as a MSc student, I was a 3MT finalist 2020-2021, participated in ComSciConCAN 2021 poster competition, completed an external internship with Dr. Meaghan Jones to gain bio-informatic research, a TA for MBIO 1010/2020 courses, and I was featured in UM Today Story as well as local CTV news. I look forward to achieving even more accomplishments this academic year!