Introduction

This is an interview with Abby Dernburg, Ph.D., a professor of molecular and cell biology at the
University of California, Berkeley, an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a faculty
senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Abby’s research mainly focuses on the
mechanisms that ensure faithful chromosome segregation during meiosis and how meiosis contributes to
genome stability and evolution. Abby’s academic career started at the University of California, Berkeley
where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry. She first accumulated research experience in
synthetic biology and chemistry labs., and then joined Dan Koshland’s lab studying bacterial chemotaxis.
After graduation, triggered by a desire to study structural biology and protein structure, she entered the
Tetrad Program of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, where she
developed fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) methods to study chromosomes and collaborated on
projects about meiosis. For her postdoctoral work, she started working with C.elegans in Anne Villeneuve
at Stanford University, adapting FISH methods to study chromosomal architecture during meiosis. In
2000, Abby started her laboratory at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of
California, Berkeley to further investigate chromosome dynamics during C.elegans meiosis.

What are the key values in your field?

“There are many ways to be a good scientist. Scientists who stand out find new ways to ask a question
and new questions to ask.”
Abby explains that one nice thing about science is that there are many ways to be good at it. Many traits
are valued in the scientific community. To be a good scientist, a person should not only be technically
proficient but also need to have scientific intuition, that is, a sense of what is an interesting or significant
biological question. Besides, creativity and originality are important. Science is not merely using tools to
generate a lot of useless data but is to find new ways to ask questions and new questions to ask. Scientific
communication, such as writing and talks, is critical for getting insights into how to ask good scientific
questions and find connections between things. While scientists should open to new ideas and new
interpretations, they should also be skeptical, question things, and think about alternative interpretations
instead of passively accepting them as facts. Scientists care about truths, so honesty is valued and
scientific frauds are bad, creating distrust in the actual scientific process.

What are the most pressing issues in your field?

“There is no way to fully answer ‘why’ questions most of the time.”
There are a lot of open and interesting questions in the field of chromosome biology. Abby points out that
DNA topology is an important yet underexplored topic. After studying meiosis for almost 25 years to
understand how chromosomes pair and how meiotic recombination initiates, Abby realizes that it might
be possible to answer why meiosis happens. She suggests that questions such as “why meiotic
recombination is beneficial” and “why meiosis is important for genetic evolution” are interesting to
explore. She also proposes that chromosome pairing and how chromosomes recognize homologs may be
related to DNA topology and worth investigating. In a broader sense, why eukaryotes have sexual
reproduction and how sexual reproduction allows developmental complexity in eukaryotes compared to
prokaryotes are pressing issues in the developmental biology field. Despite the significance of those
questions, Abby also comments that it is difficult to fully answer “why” questions in the scientific field
most of the time.
What kinds of reading and writing do you do and what do you value in writing?
“Writing is a skill that to become good at it, you need feedback.”
Abby states that the most important class she took in Berkeley was the writing class. After becoming a
professor, she can get acceptance or rejection for papers or grants, but constructive feedback is seldom
given. However, constructive feedback is really important for developing skills to write persuasively. She
continues to learn how to write persuasively and set herself in the point of view of the audience by being a
peer reviewer for papers and grants. She also points out that people need to balance the level of detail in
writing. Detail in the scientific work can be interesting, but too much detail is burdensome while too little
detail is not convincing enough. Abby appreciates a good scientific story that goes through the path of
discovering something in scientific papers or talks. Rhetorical skills are also very important to make
writing more appealing.

What are the journals and/or conferences you like in your field?
Abby goes to conferences for different reasons. She likes to go to large conferences like the American
Society of Cell Biology Conferences because they connect her to a lot of people from different fields and
diverse sciences. Large conferences can sometimes be overwhelming when having to work out with a lot
of people. She likes to go to small conferences like Meiosis Conference because she can learn the
breakthroughs in the field but sometimes they can be too focused and too saturated with meiosis-related
topics. In very focused conferences, sometimes people don’t tell a good story since people already know
the context very well, and not much new information is given. Her favorite is the Chromosome Dynamics
Conference which is of intermediate size and involves diverse experimental techniques and various
research topics.

Abby dislikes the stereotype that the quality of research work should be determined by the fame of the
journals. She comments that sometimes CNS chooses papers based on citability instead of their long-term
impacts and too advanced papers may not be well-recognized. Some of her favorite papers come from
journals like Genetics and Journal of Cell Biology. She also prefers journals that grant open access such
as Science Advances.

Conclusion
The interview with Abby, my PI at the Dernburg Lab, has taught me a lot about scientific writing from her
perspective. I learned more about her academic journey, her values in the scientific field, and her
suggestions for improving scientific writing skills.