Six weeks in the Ma Lab at UMass Amherst, summer 2026.

We made the fungus glow.

Fusarium oxysporum blinds people and kills bananas — one fungus, two kingdoms. Its human strains slip past the immune system better than the plant ones do. You can’t study a fight you can’t see, so we put a red fluorescent protein into a human clinical strain, to watch what happens when a macrophage finds it.

UMass Amherst research poster: RFP Transformation of Human Strains of Fusarium oxysporum

RFP Transformation of Human Strains of Fusarium oxysporum

Ma Lab, UMass Amherst — August 2026, with Jerry Zhang

Into the fungus

Jadon Li's ACSEF science-fair poster: The Investigation of Pain Mediators in a Mouse Gout Model

The Investigation of Pain Mediators in a Mouse Gout Model

ACSEF 2025 — 3rd, computational biology

Hover a poster to read it close up. Click for full size.

Same hyphae, two channels.

Brightfield shows the fungus. The red channel shows only what carries the reporter. In strain 8996 they are the same object — and the negative control stays dark.

Brightfield confocal image — Trans. 8996

RFP merge — Trans. 8996, the transformed keratitis strain

Figure 1: agarose gel of PCR products — 100 bp ladder, HygR, positive control, mRFP — Figure 1 — PCR products: Hygromycin 563 bp · RFP 372 bp. The plasmid is real.

Agarose gel confirming hygromycin-resistance and RFP bands in plasmid and fungal DNA — Figure 2b — gel confirmation: HygR + RFP bands in plasmid and fungal DNA vs the 1 kb ladder.

Six weeks at the bench.

Nine to four every weekday, under a PhD mentor. Four steps, and each one exists for a reason — pick one.

Plasmid extraction workflow from the poster: miniprep from RFP E. coli, PCR confirmation of HygR and mRFP, linearization with Psp-OMI, beside the confirming gel

Circular plasmid has no free ends and won't replicate in Fusarium. Linearizing gives the construct ends that integrate into the fungal genome.

What I ran myself.

Pull the plasmid DNA out of E. coli and clean it up.

Jadon in a lab coat and purple gloves, micropipetting at the bench in the Ma Lab — Micropipetting in the Ma Lab.

Jadon walking a visitor through the RFP poster during the poster session — Presenting at the poster session.

Jadon with the team in front of the Fusarium RFP poster at UMass Amherst — Poster day, with Dr. Li-Jun Ma and Jerry Zhang.

The rest of it, if you want it.

Both projects are the same problem twice: a pain signal you can only see in the transcriptome, and a pathogen you can only see once it’s tagged.

The pain isn't only in the joint.

Healthy mice against gouty ones, three tissues, one RNA-seq pipeline in R.

Three volcano plots (ankle joint, DRG, spinal cord) with up/down-regulated gene counts — Result 2 — volcano plots per tissue. Up/Down DEGs at FDR<0.05, |log2FC|>0.3.

ankle joint
1424 up/2479 down
dorsal root ganglia
1254 up/869 down
spinal cord
202 up/164 down

Nine mediators, and two of the three tissues are nerves.

They go up at the inflamed joint, and again in the dorsal root ganglia and spinal cord — the pain is amplified somewhere a joint drug never reaches.

chemokine — leukocyte recruitment

Heatmaps of the key pain mediators across ankle joint, DRG, and spinal cord — Result 6 — pain-mediator heatmaps, significant up-regulation in the MSU groups.

Externally checked.

2025USABOHonorable MentionScore 26 · semifinalist cutoff 28
2025UK Biology OlympiadSilverTop 10%
2025ACSEF — Computational Biology3rd PlaceBCOM category

The full record

Teaching it forward.