Short Documentary - Dr Parwinder Kaur, DNA Zoo

Hi I’m Parwinder Kaura I work here at UWA as an Associate Professor and my expertise is in agricultural and environmental biotechnology I do a lot of fun stuff and that’s what my every day is filled with as you know I’m a scientist I do science and specifically in the biotech area with all the new technologies and tools we’ve got we are able to do things which have only happened in my sci-fi dreams or sci-fi movies earlier so it’s super fun to be able to unpack the DNA of something which has never ever ever been done I like to be in the lab that’s kind of my favorite part of the day I don’t get to be in the lab every day these days but still I manage I sneak in a couple of days in a week. As you know that we generate huge amounts of data like with DNA Zoo we generate terabytes of data every week and so you know I spend quite a lot of my time these days doing the analysis of those data sets and that’s not done on a normal desktop computer anymore because it’s huge amounts of data if I just have to compare 3,000 genes with 3,000 genes you’re looking at about three years and one normal species would have like 20,000 to 40,000 genes so we use supercomputers and we use Pawsey Super Computing Centre to do most of those analysis and yeah so that’s you know generating data, analysing data, training students teaching. I try to go out to the schools a lot to be able to pass on all what we’re doing and excite our younger generation so that they can follow on all the legacies which we are creating when they grow up yeah so that’s that’s kind of my average day looks like a lot of fun. No two days in my life kind of looks similar the everyday it’s kind of different so whatever I do today I’m eagerly waiting what’s gonna happen or what I’m gonna get out of it tomorrow so I jump out of the way to come to work I will probably not leave I’ll probably live here and I did when I was doing my PhD. DNA Zoo is the most fun project I’ve ever ever ever done or I could think of doing.

What is 02:35 - DNA Zoo? DNA Zoo is a not-for-profit organisation and it was founded in Houston so basically using that technology you can visualise the DNA in a three-dimensional view and that view many different aspects of learning about that DNA that how a two meter long noodle or in other words you say it a three billion letter code fits in a six micro nucleus can you believe that? Understanding that actually led to founding DNA Zoo so while we were doing that on across different species we found that we were able to discover many many many different things and also discovered that our planet is actually in the middle of the sixth mass extinction and there’s about one million species to say the least which urgently needs some sort of a support from us because they are at the verge of extinction. DNA Zoo just trying to empower all the species who co- inhabit this planet with us and give them the same support we’ve got for our own species, we’re doing personalised medicine our genome was only sequenced 10 years back and how far we have come you know curing diseases and being able to provide solutions to things which we never thought we would. So I think there is a lot of power in understanding all this and unfortunately we haven’t had those resources available for any other species except for our own so that’s exactly what DNA Zoo is doing we’ve only launched it in November 2018, it’s become a global project we are more than 75 collaborators across eight different countries. The biggest message or the key message which I would like to give to the generation now is there is no shortcut to hard work so never ever think that you can achieve things which you dream of without doing any sort of hard work so hard work is always going to be the key for achieving anything. On top of that i really want our next generation to be open and empathetic at the same time so when i say open to being thoughtful and also open to opportunities you know because they might you don’t know what’s going to come your way so if you’re open and prepared at the same time you will make the best out of the things that will come your way.

Always be 04:47 - conscious that you’re not the only one here so you got to be making sure that you look after everyone around you every other species around you the planet you live on because it’s precious.