Yao Shen is the 2024 recipient of the BSC Doctoral Thesis Award, for her PhD thesis entitled: “Structural insights into the role of TnsC in DNA targeting by the Tn7 transposon“, which she defended last April.
During her PhD, Yao worked in the group of Dr. Alba Guarné at McGill and used multiple experimental techniques to study and solve the structure of the bacterial adaptor protein TnsC. She showed in particular that TnsC gets recruited to its DNA target site thanks to the distortion imposed by another protein, TnsD.
