OTTAWA – A 14-year-old Saskatoon girl won the nation’s top biotechnology competition for students on Tuesday for her contributions in finding a way to determine if a dangerous fungus is present in lentil crops.
Rui Song, the youngest winner ever of the Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge, accepted the award at a gala in Ottawa where she beat out high-school-aged competition from across the country.
The Grade 9 student at Walter Murray Collegiate in Saskatoon worked on a method to differentiate between two strains of the fungus Colletotrichum truncate. While both strains viciously attack lentil crops, one causes far more damage – up to 50 per cent loss of harvests in some areas.
The fungus has affected lentil crops in Canada, Bangladesh, Syria and Ethiopia.
Song and a mentor from the University of Saskatchewan designed 2,000 potential genetic markers and tested 50 of them, trying to see if they could differentiate between the two strains.
In the end, Song was not able to, but she said earlier her efforts have opened up a promising avenue for future research. "If we tested the other 1,950, there is a chance that we would be able to find a marker that is able to differentiate between them," she said.
Song – who won $5,000 to share with her school and a trip to Chicago for her efforts – was humble in accepting her award.
"I really didn’t come to this competition expecting to win a prize," she said. "I was really surprised . . . I just wanted to present my project to the best of my ability and to represent Saskatoon to the best of my ability."
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