• Question: What do you specialise in?

    Asked by anon-253732 to Sophie, Sophie, Sonia, Nicole, Laura on 7 May 2020.
    • Photo: Laura Durrant

      Laura Durrant answered on 7 May 2020:

      I specialise in preparing DNA for sequencing. Research groups come to us with samples that they want to know the DNA code of. To do this, we create DNA ‘libraries’ – these contain thousands of small DNA fragments that have several molecular tags attached to them. The most important tags make the DNA compatible with the sequencing machines. Another important tag lets us track the DNA as it goes through the process. This is important because thousands of DNA fragments can be processed in a single sequencing run – if they’re not tagged, we wouldn’t know which sample is which! Because of the high number of samples that are sequenced, all of this is usually done using expensive robots. However, some samples aren’t successful when done this way – so myself and my team do it by hand instead.
      I hope that wasn’t too in-depth!

    • Photo: Sophie Pritchard

      Sophie Pritchard answered on 8 May 2020:

      Hey! I specialise in Histology. Histology is the study of the structure (anatomy) of human cells and tissues beneath a microscope. I work on all sorts of tissue ranging from heart, lungs, thymus and kidney tissue. Cells appear clear beneath the microscope, but by using a special stain called H&E (haematoxylin and eosin) the nucleus is stained purple and the cytoplasm pink, allowing us to clearly see their structure. I also use fluorescent dyes on my tissues to visualise the expression of genes within tissues. This helps us to study healthy tissue vs diseased tissue. Let me know if you have any other questions 🙂

    • Photo: Nicole Wheeler

      Nicole Wheeler answered on 8 May 2020: last edited 11 May 2020 2:36 pm

      I specialise in building “artificial intelligence” or “machine learning” algorithms for identifying bacteria that pose a risk to humans through their DNA. This means that rather than giving a computer instructions on how to find dangerous bacteria, I give it a lot of examples of dangerous and safe bacteria, and let it “learn” how to tell the difference. I also focus on situations where AI behaves in ways we may not expect, or disadvantages a particular group of people, and develop ways to fix this.

    • Photo: Sophie Adjalley

      Sophie Adjalley answered on 10 May 2020: last edited 10 May 2020 10:05 pm

      Hi KrimaH,

      Many thanks for your question!
      I specialise in malaria parasite genetics. My objective is to better understand the biological role of the genes present in the malaria parasite genome as so far there is not much we know about more than half of those!
      The idea is to identify which genes are important for the malaria parasite to survive: if we can develop methods to target them and interfere with their functions, this might provide new ways to prevent the parasite’s development/propagation and fight the disease.

    • Photo: Sonia Rodriguez

      Sonia Rodriguez answered on 11 May 2020:

      I specialise in brown fat differentiation. My objective is to understand how the formation and activation of this tissue is controlled in humans to find a drug that could be used to increase the amount and activity of brown fat in obese and diabetic patients. For that, I culture brown fat in dishes and try to understand the molecular signals that are activated or inactivated at each step of the differentiation using different molecular biology techniques.

Comments

  • Photo: Craig

    Craig commented on :

    Hi! I specialise in whether we study diseases in labs in the “right way”.

    Lots of diseases are very difficult for us to study – they happen deep inside the body, or they develop really slowly. When we want to study them, we have to build models in a lab, that either allows us to see inside the body where the disease is happening, or that speed up the way a disease develops.

    While this is a good idea, in theory, it means that our model might not be exactly the same as the disease and this means that the way we expect diseases to develop might not be right. It also means that we might be testing drugs on models that aren’t close enough to the actual disease.

    I specialise in finding ways to make sure that the model we use to study a specific disease, osteoarthritis, is as accurate as possible.

  • Photo: Alena

    Alena commented on :

    My speciality is transcriptional regulation. This is the process by which the information encoded in genomes in the form of genes are made into proteins, that are the effector molecules that perform the cell functions.
    I use this knowledge to work out how to turn stem cells into erythrocytes so that I can understand how the malaria parasite interacts with them. It is also the way to unravel how tricks the parasite uses to invade and survive in human cells.
    The regulation of gene expression is also crucial to get insight into diseases such as cancer and I study what is it that control the way cancer cells proliferate making tumours grow nad also what could make them die.