Adele Williamson

Adele Williamson is a New Zealand biochemist who studies DNA repair systems in bacteria that inhabit extreme environments. Her research has applications in both biotechnology and medicine. She is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Waikato. She went on to undertake doctoral research at the Australian National University from 2004 to 2008, when she graduated with her PhD.

Career After her postdoctoral work at Umeå, Williamson began working as a research scientist at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in 2010, and was promoted to project leader in 2015. In 2021, she was admitted into the Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery, which consists of established scientists in New Zealand whose research targets serious human diseases. Williamson has been a member of the New Zealand Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology since 2020. These organisms are of interest because they produce enzymes called extremozymes, which are functional under extreme conditions and are applicable in many different fields, including biotechnology and medicine. In biotechnology, extremozymes are essential for diagnostic tests such as PCR. The Dry Valleys of Antarctica were chosen because its environment subjects the DNA to multiple stressors including high ultraviolet light and multiple freeze-thaw cycles. During this research, Williamson and her team sequenced metagenomes from 30 sites across the Dry Valleys. This group of cyanobacteria are the most abundant photosynthetic organism in the world. Prior to this research, it was believed that bacteria used NAD-dependent DNA ligases for replication, and archaea and eukaryotes utilise ATP-dependent DNA ligases. May 2019 - Marsden Fast-Start grant for a research project titled "DNA repair systems of the Antarctic microbial metagenome" from the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

Selected publications