GOVERNMENT

On the morning of Massey University's graduation ceremony, Paul Gardner was capped in doctoral colours, and in the afternoon, he was awarded a Royal Society medal for the best paper from his PhD project. Dr Gardner is back home from snowy Copenhagen, to catch up with friends and colleagues in Palmerston North and with family in Gisborne. He will take back to the University of Copenhagen where he is a postdoctoral researcher, the Hatherton Medal from the Royal Society of New Zealand. The Hatherton Award recognizes the best paper by a PhD student at a New Zealand university in the physical, earth, mathematical and information sciences, and was presented by Dr Brent Clothier from the Royal Society. Dr Gardner's winning research on the genetic alphabet was part of his PhD thesis, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London to considerable media attention from the BBC, Japanese television and the prestigious scientific journal Nature. Dr Gardner's research investigated the bases of DNA, which bind DNA's double helical structure in humans, animals, plants, microbes and viruses. The four chemical bases, adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine(C) and guanine (G) make up the genetic alphabet, ACGT, discovered in part by New Zealand's Nobel Prize recipient Maurice Wilkins. Mr Gardner's paper suggests the potential for more than the four bases in the DNA structure of organisms. With colleagues in the Allan Wilson Centre (AWC) for Molecular Ecology and Evolution and at Uppsala University, Sweden, he applied a computer model to investigate why four bases became the optimum number for species' DNA, when there are known to be more than four bases. His supervisor, AWC Director Professor Mike Hendy, says Dr Gardner's research is that of a true scientist, of great curiosity and a desire to further investigate established theory and understanding. In the process he learnt and mastered in-demand computing and bioinformatic methods, and the Hatherton Medal recognises this, Professor Hendy says. Using the Helix supercomputer (which has recently been upgraded to the Double Helix - New Zealand's fastest and largest research computer), Dr Gardner and colleagues computed that organisms are unlikely to evolve if their DNA alphabet has fewer or more than four bases. The supercomputer performs searches on large databases of genetic information, such as the evolution of New Zealand plants and animals, and can be used to make predictions about their future. Dr Gardner was one of the first people to use the Helix - he had a headstart over senior researchers with his work using a smaller prototype model - and says the computer was crucial to his work, with its ability to process information in two weeks compared to a full year through a standard machine. He says Massey and the AWC, a national Centre of Research Excellence, is "miles ahead" of other universities in terms of supercomputing resources and application to genetics. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Evolution Department of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and has also worked at Germany universities. His specific field is bioinformatics, the application of maths, computing and statistics to biological data such as DNA, protein and expression sequences. Professor Hendy says the relatively new field is rapidly expanding and the centre is a stronghold of bioinformatic expertise. Dr Gardner and fellow PhD graduate Lesley Collins are the first doctoral graduates from the centre, which officially opened in 2002. Dr Collins also used the Helix for her research of RNA and genetic systems and Professor Hendy says there are another 18 PhD students in the making, based in the centre. A large component of Dr Gardner's PhD thesis explored how RNA might have developed into DNA had it had two, six or eight bases, as well as the standard four. He found that four- and six-base RNA molecules were the most efficient at evolving into DNA. But four-base RNAs were the ones that were best suited to overcoming RNA's fundamental weakness: its susceptibility to making errors as it copies itself.