Sydnee Winbush grew up in the Moreno Valley in Southern California. Always interested in life sciences, she took an advanced placement human anatomy and physiology class in high school. All the laboratory classes she was taking and her watching “Untold Stories of the ER” on TV convinced her she should go to medical school. Admitted by CSU and University of California schools, the biology major chose California State University, Monterey Bay. She liked the location, weather and how welcomed she felt there.
Winbush took a biochemistry class with CSUMB instructor Dr. Arlene Haffa and was invited to work in Dr. Haffa’s lab. Winbush’s first research project, co-funded by the CSU Agricultural Research Institute (ARI), focused on pesticide bioremediation. When insecticides are used to control pests in agricultural crops, they can end up in the soil. Over time, sunlight and microbial activity degrade the insecticides. Haffa’s team hypothesized that if they could select bacteria that were particularly good at degradation, bacterial strains could be used to help rid soils of pesticide residues. They knew that most bacterial species cannot break down insecticides, but a few can, and these were the ones they wanted to identify.
Haffa’s team is working with Dr. Nathaniel Jue, also at CSUMB, who is using metagenomics and bioinformatics to identify the pesticide-degrading bacteria and discover the genes and metabolic pathways that allow these bacteria to live in pesticide-laden soils. This research is on-going, but they have already identified several bacteria taxa that appear to have pesticide degrading capabilities.
Winbush worked on a second project co-funded by the ARI in which the team monitored soil anaerobic disinfestation. The idea was to force the soil to become anaerobic, which they theorized would decrease or eliminate pathogens. They accomplished this by adding a carbon source (rice bran), a potassium nitrate solution to the soil, and covered it with a thin plastic film to promote high temperatures (solarization) and inhibit oxygen, and left it on the field for three to six weeks. During this process, they monitored the gases emitted, as well as any greenhouse gases or volatile compounds emitted from the soil.
Before working in Haffa’s lab, Winbush had no idea this type of research existed, let alone that she would be involved in it. She appreciated that under Haffa, she had a lot of independence but also tremendous responsibility to learn about her project, to read the scientific literature and to figure out how to solve the problems related to research projects. These aspects of the research experience were never replicated in any of her classes. Working on agricultural projects was an unexpected turn that made Winbush realize the benefits of agriculture and the challenges in producing food. Now aware that a career in the agricultural industry could be interesting, she has explored those possibilities as an alternative to a career in human medicine.