In a single day, JianJun Jin might switch from writing code on his computer to experimenting at a lab bench or working under greenhouse lights as an assistant curator at the New York Botanical Garden. His research spans several fields—plant systematics, genomics and computational biology—and his aim is to better understand the inner workings of plants.
Jin is the developer of GetOrganelle, a software tool that helps biologists to disentangle the DNA of organelles—small cellular structures such as mitochondria and chloroplasts—from all the other DNA in a plant cell, making it easier for them to find and study the sequences they are interested in. It is one of the most accurate tools of its kind, with hundreds of stars on GitHub.
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Jeffery DelViscio
GetOrganelle started as a side project for Jin to practice his Python programming skills. Initially, he says, some colleagues were skeptical. It was only after GetOrganelle achieved some success on a difficult dataset of legume structures that his advisers and senior collaborators encouraged him to publish the work as an academic paper. That paper now has thousands of citations.
Although a botanical garden may not seem like the obvious place for a scientist, Jin says the garden is “not just a workplace; it is part of the research system. The living collections, herbarium collections, horticultural expertise and biodiversity knowledge at the NYBG provide an unusually rich foundation for studying plant evolution.” His new challenge is trying to decipher plant genetic mosaicism, a condition in which a single organism contains multiple genomes.
From one project to the next, movement has been crucial to Jin’s success as a researcher. “There is an old Chinese saying that roughly means ‘a tree dies when moved, but a person thrives when moved.’”
This article is part of “The Young American Scientists,” an editorially independent project that was produced with financial support from Regeneron.