About Me

My name is Diana Lin, and I’m a recent graduate of the Bioinformatics Graduate program at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, BC. In October 2021, I finished my Master of Science in Bioinformatics. In 2018, I completed my Bachelor of Science in Physiology at McGill University. In between, I held an 8-month internship here at the Bioinformatics Technology Lab.

Thesis

For my Master’s thesis, I developed and executed a scalable bioinformatics-based discovery platform to conduct data mining for anti-microbial peptide (AMP) sequences in publicly available genomic resources. These genomic resources include various tissue RNA-seq reads from a broad selection of amphibians (frogs and toads) and insects (ants, bees and wasps). Discovered AMP sequences were synthesized and tested for bioactivity against various pathogens and suitability for drug development.

Internship

During the internship, I worked on the AMP project, where I usedg homology-based search methods to datamine for AMP sequences in the spruce genomes of White spruce, Sitka spruce, and Interior spruce (and eventually Engelmann spruce). My focus was on a certain class of AMPs: defensins. I also analyzed differentially expressed genes in the Sitka and Interior spruce transcriptomes, in particular, looking for AMP sequences and associated sequences in its activation pathway.

In addition to the AMP project, I learned how to use bioinformatics tools in genome assembly and annotation, as a part of the Spruce-Up project. Using these skills, I assembled and annotated the Engelmann spruce chloroplast genome, the white pine weevil mitochondrial genome, and annotated the White spruce chloroplast genome.

Education

Master of Science, Bioinformatics, University of British Columbia, 2019-2021
Bachelor of Science, Physiology, McGill University, 2014-2018