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Beatriz Rodrigues Estevam, a student at the Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture (Cena) at USP in Piracicaba, was selected in the most recent edition of The Sanger Prize Competition. This international competition offers students from low- and middle-income countries a three-month research internship at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The student plans to travel during the second semester of this year.
The Sanger Prize selection process consists of two stages. First, candidates submit a resume, a letter of interest, and the contact information of academic referees. Next, each candidate must write an essay analyzing a major genomics initiative from the past decade, evaluating its impact and how well it fulfilled its promises.
Beatriz wrote the essay Desvendando os genomas eucarióticos da Terra: por que não sequenciar tudo? (Unraveling Earth’s eukaryotic genomes: why not sequence everything?), which discusses the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), an initiative aiming to sequence and catalog the genomes of all currently described eukaryotic species on Earth over a ten-year period. “I wanted to focus on sequencing, but I didn’t have a specific initiative in mind. Almost jokingly, I asked myself: ‘Why not sequence everything?’ That question led me to the Darwin Tree of Life project, which we had discussed in a previous lab meeting, and eventually to the EBP,” explained the student in an interview with Cena’s press office.
She is currently a fellow of undergraduate research mentorship from the São Paulo Research Foundation (Fapesp), under the supervision of professor Diego Mauricio Riano Pachon at Cena. Beatriz’s first research project led to the publication of a scientific paper describing CoCoView, a computational tool developed in Python that applies information theory to study the evolution of protein-coding sequences at the codon level. A codon is a sequence of three nitrogenous bases in messenger RNA (mRNA) that codes for a specific amino acid or signals the start or end point of translation of the mRNA chain.
“I am deeply excited and grateful for this opportunity. I can’t wait to get involved with the institute and its community. I look forward to the experiences that lie ahead,” said the student, who also completed a research internship in 2023 at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology (MPIMP) in Potsdam, Germany, also supported by a Fapesp grant.
The Sanger Prize was created in 2002 after scientists John Sulston, Sydney Brenner, and Robert Horvitz won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. John Sulston wanted to donate his share of the prize money to a charitable fund managed by the Sanger Institute, and appointed a board of trustees who decided the funds should support an annual essay competition to benefit students who would otherwise lack access to the institute’s facilities.
*Text by: Fapesp Agency
English version: Nexus Traduções, edited by Denis Pacheco
