Meet a Whitehead Postdoc: Sonia Boor

Sonia Boor is a postdoc in Whitehead Institute Member Mary Gehring’s lab studying how to make the crop plant pigeon pea more resilient against climate change. We sat down with Sonia to learn more about her and her experiences in and out of the lab.

What is your current research project?

I'm working with a legume called pigeon pea, which is an underutilized crop – previously referred to as an orphan crop – that has received less attention than globally utilized crops. Pigeon pea provides a key source of nutrition for about a billion people worldwide, particularly in regions with higher levels of food insecurity, like South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean, but there isn’t much known about it. One thing we know is that there isn't a lot of genetic diversity in this crop. This is a result, as is common in crops, of a domestication bottleneck where selective breeding caused the loss of a lot of the genetic variability seen in the wild.

As the climate changes, plants are increasingly being grown in conditions for which they are not well adapted. Limited genetic variability makes it harder for them to adapt to these changes. My project is trying to increase the genetic diversity of pigeon pea. We do this using a chemotherapy drug that can create changes in genes and gene regulation. Then we’re going to take our library of pigeon pea with more genetic variants, and see if any of these variants are better adapted to conditions the plants are now facing or will likely face, such as increased soil salinity and high temperatures.

When you were a little kid, what did you want to be?

In elementary school, I wanted to be an author. I really liked reading, especially fiction, so I wanted to write stories. I don’t write anymore but I read a lot — mostly I listen to audiobooks.

When did you become interested in a research career?

I always liked science in school. In seventh grade life sciences class, we dissected earthworms and frogs, and I thought that was super fun. For a long time, I thought I wanted to be a doctor, which I think is common among high schoolers who like biology. Then in college, I learned that there are lots of other career options for people who like biology. I had my first exposure to research and really liked it. At first, I was really interested in nutrition, and for my PhD I worked on a project about how C. elegans worms sense food and feel satiety. However, when I was in graduate school, the climate crisis was just getting worse, and I felt compelled to put my molecular biology skills towards addressing that. That’s what led me to plant biology. I feel like this project that I'm working on now is a perfect blend of these interests and motivating factors.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen in the lab?

In graduate school, I was engineering certain mutations in the genes of C. elegans to see if they affected how these worms went into dauer, a mostly dormant state of arrested development. We made changes that were more or less shots in the dark. Then I looked at one of the plates of worms and saw that they had all gone into dauer. I was so excited to find that the experiment had actually worked! I don’t know if anyone else looking at that plate would have thought it was cool, but it was for me.

Where do you see yourself in ten years?

I want to continue working in research. I find my current climate-related food security work meaningful, and I really like working with plants. Hopefully, I’ll continue to do similar research, maybe in pigeon pea, maybe in another crop species. I think it would be exciting to be the head of a lab at a research institution, but if the work takes me elsewhere, like into agriculture tech or government work, I could be happy with that too.

What are your hobbies?

As I mentioned, I read and listen to audiobooks. I also like to run, which is when I do a lot of my audiobook listening. I mostly do distance running, like marathons and half marathons. I want to do all of the six marathon majors: Boston, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, London, and Berlin. I've run the three US ones, and I entered the lottery for London this year, but I didn't get in. I think the other ones are a bit harder, logistically. I can't imagine traveling to Tokyo and then running a marathon, but hopefully I'll get to see what that's like.

When did you get into running?

Not until college, but my mom was a runner when I was a kid. In elementary school, when she would go for her runs, my brother and I would ride our bikes with her, and our dog would come too. It was a kind of family outing. So running was always something that I had on my radar. I ran cross country in eighth grade, but I didn’t start running regularly until I got to college.

Do you have any advice for someone who wants to start running?

I say to people that if you like walking, you can like running. I think when a lot of people start running, they start running too fast. Then they think it’s too hard. If you just go a little bit faster than walking at the beginning, it’s a lot easier, and you can ramp up over time.

Do you collect anything?

My biggest collection is house plants. A lot of people in the Gehring lab are very plant-y people in general, and so a lot of us have plants at home. I also collect Christmas tree ornaments. When my husband and I travel, or when something meaningful happens, we usually pick up a Christmas tree ornament to commemorate that. We have an ornament from the hotel where we were staying when we got engaged, some National Park ornaments, a bell from Greece, and a lot of others. It's fun to only see them once a year; that feels more special.

Do you have a favorite house plant?

I’m particularly attached to a fun plant that we’ve named Barbara, kind of a play off the French word for tree (arbre). She’s an umbrella tree. She actually got stolen from me when I moved a few apartments ago. We left her on the sidewalk outside our apartment temporarily, and I think our neighbors thought that she was on the street for free. They took her and we could see her through the window, like “That's our plant!” Then they put her on a shared back porch one summer day to water her, and we decided to take her back.

Did you take her back without explanation?

Yes, that's exactly what happened. We also had her by the window, so they probably saw that and thought “They took our plant!” I think part of the reason why they had her out back, actually, was that she was infested with bugs, and eight years later she still has a bug problem. Maybe that’s some karmic justice for stealing the plant back. For the record, I do not condone stealing, but this was a special exception!

What’s your favorite meal to cook or eat?

We do a lot of vegan cooking at home. I'm vegan, and my husband is mostly vegan. Last week, we made some lentil falafel with a bunch of herbs, and that was really good. They're kind of like little lentil cookies.

If you were going to tell a high school student one thing about your research field to pique their interest, what would you say?

In the Gehring lab, we talk a lot about seeds. Seeds are essentially the basis of all the calories that we consume, because we're either eating seeds directly, we're eating things that came from seeds, or we're eating things that have eaten seeds. So seed biology is really important in a food context. In projects like mine, we’re working on making seeds and the plants that come from seeds better equipped to tolerate climate change, and I think that should matter to anyone concerned about food security in the future.