Anvesha Saxena

I am a Year in Industry Student at Earlham Institute, studying for an MSci in Biochemistry (Molecular Biology) at University College London (UCL).

Prior to this, I completed an internship at the Botnar Research Centre, University of Oxford, where I used short-read RNA sequencing to investigate the mechanism of a drug affecting multiple myeloma cells. This helped develop my interests in advanced genomic and transcriptomic technologies, as well as using bioinformatic approaches.

I will be working as part of a collaboration between Jose De Vega’s Lab and Carolina Grandellis’ Group, where I will be investigating how evolutionary patterns of nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptors (NLRs) can be used to predict disease resistance. This will involve using comparative genomics, protein language models and high-throughput functional validation through the Earlham Biofoundry to identify genes that could protect bananas against Panama disease.