Lab Rat: Kwee Boon Brandon Seah ’11

When Kwee Boon Brandon Seah ’11 looks at a harbor or marina, what would strike the normal observer as an ordinary shore habitat represents a microbiological paradise.

At the end of his sophomore year, Seah began studying molgulid tunicates, a family of marine invertebrate animals more commonly known as “sea squirts” or “sea grapes.” Seah studies the sea squirt’s symbionts, or organisms that have beneficial relationships with each other.

He is specifically interested in a protistan named Nephromyces and bacteria that live within them. For his senior thesis, Seah will identify the evolutionary relationships of the bacterial partners and examine the genetic variability and coevolution between molgulids and Nephromyces.

“What I’m interested in is...the evolutionary history,” Seah said. “I’m studying a phenomenon called ‘codiversification.’ When a new species forms, does a symbiont evolve along with it?”

Seah’s research will offer a valuable comparative basis for studying molgulids, according to Mary Beth Saffo, Seah’s co-adviser at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Mass., where he conducts part of his research.

“In leading their non-textbook lives, non-model organisms [like molgulids] stimulate fresh biological questions and force us to re-examine tidy biological theories based only on the lives of organisms in controlled laboratory cultures,” Saffo said.

Before the summer of 2009, Seah applied to an internship program at the MBL, and has been working there ever since his acceptance.

The majority of Seah’s research is done on campus in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. He performs his on-campus research in the lab of his other co-adviser, Biology Professor Colleen Cavanaugh. For his work, Seah amplified the genes of interest and sent them to be sequenced last summer in a process that he considers “a lot of trial and error.”

Seah said that he designs primers, which are short pieces of DNA flanking the gene or gene fragment that he wishes to amplify, from species taken from local museums, the Maine shore, and even common harbors around Mass.

Seah said that he hopes to find enough species to reconstruct a “family tree” of the molgulid tunicates and its symbionts, which will allow him to tell a convincing story as to whether codiversification occurs in these organisms.

“Research is open ended—there are always new questions as you go,” Seah said. “But I hope we will know enough so that whatever student works on this next can address the functional purposes [of my research]. That way we can start looking into the functional biology and how things actually work.”

The aspiring scientist plans to continue his work in a graduate program involving microbiology and marine biology.

“My dream is someday to go off the coast of Chile to dredge up this huge [Molgula],” Seah said. “This is a giant one, and I’ve never seen a specimen of it. I’m attracted to where the mysteries are, and the least we know about the natural world is living in the ocean.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: October 3, 2010

An earlier version of the Oct. 1 news article "Lab Rat: Kwee Boon Brandon Seah ’11" incorrectly stated that Seah designs gene sequences. In fact, he designs primers, which are short pieces of DNA flanking the gene or gene fragment that he wishes to amplify.