A Journey To Preserve Marine Biodiversity Through Bioengineering
Molly Johnson, E’25, bioengineering and biochemistry, completed two co-ops in DNA editing and analysis. After graduation, she plans to apply her knowledge and skills to monitor and protect marine ecosystems.
The tantalizing salty fragrance, calming rhythm, and fathomless depths of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have enchanted Molly Johnson, E’25, bioengineering and biochemistry, since she was five. While sailing across them, she explored the many mysteries hidden within the ocean.
Her daily activities documented how the ocean changed over the 12 years she spent living on the water with her family. In the first few years, she caught a fish almost every day and snorkeled around vibrant and diverse coral reefs. By the time she was 15, the coral reefs were bleached white and no longer housed a vast variety of marine life. And catching a fish a day became catching one fish almost every week.
Molly Johnson and her family sailed across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for 12 years.
“It was so shocking that in just 10 years, the ocean lost so much biodiversity. The communities I grew up in were declining and vanishing altogether because of the oceans’ worsening health. I’m getting a degree in bioengineering so I can create solutions that preserve and improve biodiversity in the oceans,” Johnson explains.
Co-op at Ocean Genome Legacy Center at Northeastern
That’s why she applied to the Ocean Genome Legacy Center (OGL) at Northeastern for her first co-op. OGL is not just a research lab but a repository for biological specimens and genomic data. It’s “dedicated to exploring and preserving the wealth of information contained in the DNA of marine organisms.” Researchers all over the world can submit their marine specimens to the lab for DNA extraction and sequencing, creating a global biorepository that’s accessible to anyone.
Johnson’s personal experience motivated her to study biological diversity and protect marine ecosystems, and this devotion echoes the lab’s goal to acquire, authenticate, and study as many oceanic species as possible.
“The more accessible it is, the more research we get and the more we’re able to monitor the biodiversity of our oceans,” she says.
Johnson at the 2023 High School Marine Science Symposium with coworkers from Ocean Genome Legacy and Marine Science Center.
Cryopreservation is currently the best way to preserve DNA for long periods, but it requires liquid nitrogen that isn’t readily accessible to many labs. Johnson’s role was to develop a cheaper and more stable method of preserving marine species’ DNA long-term. EDTA is a chelating agent, meaning it’s a chemical molecule that binds to metal ions. EDTA can sequester divalent cations that activate DNases, the enzymes that degrade DNA, thus preserving DNA. The team analyzed whether it’s a viable method for long-term preservation of DNA.
Research in faculty lab
Looking to expand her experience to learn about terrestrial bioengineering and biochemistry, she joined the Lee-Parsons Lab part-time in her third year. The principal investigator, Carolyn Lee-Parsons, associate professor of chemical engineering, chemistry, and chemical biology, founded the lab intending to optimize the extraction methods of two anti-cancer drugs, vinblastine and vincristine, from the Catharanthus roseus or the Madagascar periwinkle plant.
Out of her marine element, Johnson was nervous about working with terrestrial plants. “They kind of scare me. I don’t have a green thumb whatsoever; I’ve never managed to even keep a plant alive. But I was excited to learn more about CRISPR—short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and is used by researchers to edit genetic code—to engineer plants,” Johnson said.
During her semester working part-time for the lab, she dedicated her time to understanding relevant research and experimental designs. She used this knowledge to develop a project she could work on as a co-op in the spring of 2024. To fund her project, she applied and won an AJC Merit Research Scholarship.
The lab designs plasmids with CRISPR that induce mutations in the DNA of their plants that increase the production of the anti-cancer drugs. The trick is to insert the DNA into the plants in such a way that when they reproduce, the mutation is intact.
The idea of Johnson’s project is to use the bacteria Agrobacterium tumefaciens—a natural genetic engineer that transfers fragments of DNA into plant cells— to insert their plasmids into the Madagascar periwinkle plant’s DNA. For her research, she won the fall 2024 PEAK Experiences Award from Northeastern’s Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships and presented her preliminary findings at last year’s spring RISE Expo. She plans to wrap up her research by the end of summer 2025 and write an honors thesis on her findings.
Next steps
Post-graduation in December 2025, she’s ready to take what she learned from the novelty of CRISPR research at the Lee-Parsons Lab and DNA analysis at OGL to monitor the biodiversity of marine life.
She wants to dive into how to utilize CRISPR to analyze environmental DNA collected from water samples from the ocean. By sequencing these DNA samples, she can identify the species and their abundance within a localized ecosystem, essentially mapping the biodiversity of the area.
She is currently applying to a PhD program at the University of Otago in New Zealand, a country she spent many years sailing around. With the right amount of dedication and passion for positive change, Johnson thinks she can “accomplish anything.”