Deciphering the Code of Life
GSAS Voices: Yekaterina Shulgina, PhD ’23
Yekaterina Shulgina, PhD student in systems biology
Throughout its 150th anniversary year, GSAS is foregrounding the voices of some of its most remarkable alumni and students as they speak about their work, its impact, and their experiences at the School.
Yekaterina “Kate” Shulgina is a graduating PhD student in Harvard’s Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology program. She talks about her work to identify variations in the genetic code that cells use to translate mRNA sequences into proteins, what her discoveries could mean for biological research, and the impact that her advisor, Ellmore C. Patterson Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Sean Eddy, has had on her development as a scientist.
Genetic Exceptions
In the cell, most functions are carried out by proteins. The instructions for how to make these proteins come from our genes, which are nucleotide sequences. When a protein is being produced, it's read off from mRNA in each group of three nucleotides—a codon. Each codon specifies a single amino acid in the protein that’s being built. So, the cell has this “lookup table” for the genetic code, and it uses it to figure out which codon means which amino acid.