Fellowship report by Ambreen Asif
I have been offered this fellowship by Professor Adam Price to work on “Genetic mapping in rice” at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland (UK) for three months. I joined the University on 14th January 2017. Since then I got full support from my supervisor (Adam Price), Tony Travis and all other members of the Rice group. They helped me not only in my work but also provided full assistance for all arrangements, like accommodation, communication, shopping, etc. Very soon I well adjusted myself there because of their full cooperation. The Scottish people are very helping. It was a great time, I made so many friends: Roshi, Munmi, Naveed, Partha, Bow, Jeet, Mayuri, Laura, Sushmita, Ram, Kirstein, Michael, Hui, Charlie, Daniel. On the weekends we usually went to visit Sea Ton, Duthie Park and Union Square. Sometimes we went to harbour area, city centre, for shopping in Lidl, Tescos, and Spar etc. Tony invited me for a big event “Burns Supper” in Alford. We had a lot of fun there and also visited Boomezelium and other recreational places.
With Professor Adam Price
At the Green House, University of Abredeen
In this way I spent my free time with my friends and enjoyed with them but at the same time I tried to work hard to achieve the main aim of my fellowship. It was about to learn the statistical and bioinformatic methods used to conduct Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) in rice to map genetic markers to genes involved in biochemical pathways related to nitrogen-use efficiency. The main outcome of our work for genetic mapping in rice is that we successfully observed good candidate QTL’s in the experimental phenotypes. Some of the potential QTL’s were found close to genes known to be involved in nitrogen use-efficiency. To be skilled in this technique is of great value as the same can be utilized in my future research to have new results and outputs.
With Tony Travis
With Michael (centre) and Wang (right) at Genomics Laboratory, University of Aberdeen
I wish to express my gratitude to all my teachers and supervisor for their encouragement, my family members who supported me at every step of preparation of this visit and my friends who always stood by me for their miscellaneous help.
Ambreen Asif
