Evelyn Sun's research while affiliated with University of British Columbia - Vancouver and other places

... Such amendments in faculty and curriculums address the call for more authentic research, developing a shared vision with reflective pedagogical practices in instructors. The University of British Columbia reformed its URE in microbiology by developing a unique CURE model revolving around an undergraduate research journal (Sun et al., 2020b). Their CURE operated in a feed-forward manner where student teams worked to formulate their research questions, derive hypotheses, and perform experiments to publish their work in the journal, subsequently deriving new research questions in the course. ...

... Greater studies conducted in CURE models are because of their emerging nature in well-developed countries. While the traditional UREs are well established in these regions, CUREs are deemed newer-generation models increasingly researched and sought to be implemented in disciplines related to the life sciences (Sun et al., 2020a). In biology-related fields, where lab courses had been a staple of the curriculum since inception, the UREs took the form of a "cookbook" procedure where students were obliged to a recipe to procure a known result (Brownell et al., 2013). ...

... Opposite of tradition, citizen science actively leverages the talents and interests of informal scientists (85,92). The idea gains traction when we also consider the dissemination of novice research, such as with undergraduate research journals (96). The Undergraduate Journal of Experimental Microbiology and Immunology (UJEMI) is informed by novice researchers and overseen by early-career scientists (graduate students and postdocs) (96). ...

... It was subsequently discovered that this organism has evolved a complex, interwoven network of regulatory mechanisms (Galán-Vásquez, Luna, & Martinez-Antonio, 2011;Huang et al., 2019) that permit adaptation to a wide variety of environmental challenges, infection scenarios, and stresses (Fernández, Breidenstein, & Hancock, 2011). In the post-genomic era it has become clear that "lifestyle" adaptations such as swarming motility potentially involve of hundreds of genes (based on knockouts preventing swarming) and altered expression of many more (Fernández et al., 2011;Overhage, Bains, Brazas, & Hancock, 2008;Pletzer et al., 2020). It is also becoming clearer that the somewhat hierarchical network of regulatory interactions controlling such complex processes also leads to a tailoring of P. aeruginosa lifestyle and metabolic capabilities. ...

... The study of bacterial motility inside a host is a more complex affair, which is why many studies simulate host conditions in vitro. Soft agar can, up to some extent, mimic physical, chemical, and nutritional conditions inside and outside the host [29,72,73]. Furthermore, chambers can mimic environments such as xylem vessels [74], enabling the discovery that Xylella fastidiosa migrates against the flow via twitching motility, and anaerobiosis, allowing researchers to prove that Clostridioides difficile modulates its swimming speed in the presence of a metabolite related to its host colonization [75]. ...

... This bacterium is considered nowadays as a major cause of morbidity and mortality in cystic fibrosis and immunocompromised patients. Besides, this pathogen has developed adaptive resistance mechanisms including biofilm formation (Klochgetheret al. 2017;Sun et al. 2018) and exhibited an increased level of resistance toward a wide variety of conventional treatments (Ahmed et al. 2018;Ciofu et al. 2019). Therefore, the discovery of new antibacterial and antibiofilm compounds has drawn more attention (Gupta et al. 2017). ...