Nonetheless, my journey is entirely distinct as none of my family is involved in science whatsoever. When I was attending graduate school, I told my mother, ‘I’m in the lab. I’ve got to go clone fish.’ And she was incredibly thrilled and inquired, ‘Oh, my goodness. Are you creating a Dolly?’ Like Dolly, the cloned sheep. I replied, ‘No. I’m making additional copies of a specific gene.’ And she responded, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be cooler if you made fish?’ Well, yes. Therefore, there’s always a lot of explanation involved. However, my family enjoys learning about what I do, and I’m immensely thankful for their support along the way, even when I’m not creating additional fish.
Have there been any other challenges or constraints that you had to overcome to shape your professional journey?
Initially, I believed my calling was to be a veterinarian, but I soon realized that I couldn’t bear to put people’s pets to sleep. That was too emotionally challenging. My undergraduate experience at the University of Florida wasn’t my strongest suit, but I genuinely enjoyed genetics. I was fortunate enough to learn from Dr. Wayne, who cared about her students as individuals, and we shared some common life experiences. She asked if I wanted to volunteer in her lab, and I ended up working in her quantitative genetics fruit fly lab for almost four years. That experience was life-altering, and I credit her with guiding me on a scientific trajectory.
How did you find your way to ORNL?
I studied endemic Hawaiian waterfall-climbing gobies for nearly 13 years prior to joining ORNL, first as a graduate student at Clemson University with Dr. Ptacek and then as a postdoc at Tulane University and the University of Tennessee with Dr. Mike Blum. I have integrated my conservation and genetics expertise into the hydropower sector to comprehend how hydropower influences our aquatic habitats and the species inhabiting them. We are developing strategies to safeguard the organisms we study using noninvasive techniques. That’s why employing environmental DNA and RNA from a water sample is so fascinating. There’s an entire realm of information contained within. How can we interpret it?
How do you accomplish this? Are there fish cells suspended in the water?
Yes, there are, but it’s not just fish and not limited to water; eDNA and eRNA exist in the air and soil as well. You can extract pollinator DNA from honey to determine which flowers the bees have visited. We primarily focus on fish, but we can raise inquiries related to freshwater mussels, aquatic flora, or terrestrial processes such as watershed runoff, land use alterations, and more.
What issues are you attempting to address with these noninvasive tracking methods?
Our aim is to discern what information we can derive from a water sample. Methods involving eDNA have only been in practice for approximately 12 years. We are quite adept at using it to determine which species are present and improving our ability to quantify the number of individuals. An important question we’re tackling—and this hasn’t really been explored before—is: Can we utilize eDNA to ascertain the age of a fish or the age of the entire fish population? If you have several old, post-reproductive individuals and there’s some climate change or disturbance, is that population at risk and in danger of extinction? Or do you have a multitude of young, reproductive individuals and they’re beginning to expand and potentially invade? You can possibly obtain that information from water samples. And there’s an abundance of information and queries we could address by using eRNA in conjunction with eDNA.
Why? What distinguishes eRNA from eDNA?
DNA can persist in the environment for an extremely long duration. Researchers can collect core samples from the Arctic and identify species that existed hundreds of thousands of years ago. However, RNA degrades quite rapidly. After about 12 hours, it diminishes almost entirely, thus providing a very precise snapshot of what’s in the water at that specific moment. In fish ladders—structures that allow fish to navigate past hydropower facilities—we’re interested in which and how many species are moving through. That means eDNA can reveal who is present, and eRNA can indicate how many at that specific time, which is quite innovative. Yet, there’s so much information in water that we still don’t fully comprehend.
What’s on the horizon?
For one of our projects funded by the Water Power Technologies Office, we are creating a robot we refer to as eDNA-bot (pronounced ‘Edna Bot’). Indeed, it’s a female. The objective is to enable her to be deployed worldwide to collect water, process and sequence it, inform you of what’s present and in what quantities, and send you the data. Users will have the ability to program eDNA-bot on its functions, but she also possesses autonomous capabilities. She can say, ‘We’re experiencing a flood. I’m going to retract myself, switch to low power mode, and hunker down.’ Then, once the environment stabilizes again, she will emerge and sample.
