Profile

I live in Edinburgh with my boyfriend. I have an electronic piano and he has several guitars so we enjoy playing music together. I love baking, currently I have been making my own yeast to make sourdough bread. In my spare time I learn Japanese off Duolingo, play the piano and try to keep in shape by doing yoga and many squats.

Similarly to children learning from their parents about their family history, cells also learn from their parental cells about their identity and job in the body. When the mother/parental cell splits into two daughter cells, they are each left with a DNA package. I can colour parts of the DNA package with glowing (fluorescent) probes to see when the daughter cells unpackage it. I also try to make mother cells divide at the same time by synchronising them with different chemicals. The chemicals make the cells stop at the same time during the cell cycle, similar to how when you run a race, all of the runners line up at the start line. Then I wash the cells which makes them start ‘running’ at the same time and they should divide into two cells at the same time. That way, when I look at the coloured glowing probes at a specific time, I would expect to see mostly newly divided daughter cells:

I usually get up early and go to work at about 9-10 am but sometimes I might go in later or during the weekend. Some experiments have also required me to go in much earlier as I do a lot of work with specific timings. For example, I might come in early to wash cells so they can grow at the same time to divide at a similar time 12 hours later. Of course, I do not always do such long days! Some days might even be quite short (generally my Mondays) as I would have washed and fed my cells, planned my experiments for the week and even read a bit. An example experiment is when I want to take pictures of cells unpackaging their DNA. On Monday I would wash the cells, then I will put them on glass slides and leave them to grow for 1-2 days. I might put chemicals on them, depending on the experiment. Then I would take the glass slides, now with many cells on them, and freeze them so they are ‘fixed’ in time. After that I need to put my colourful fluorescent probes (in green and red) on the slides, so I would have to do special chemical washes at high temperatures (up to 80 degrees Celsius!) to make sure the probes go in the cells. Finally, I can look at the cells under a microscope that takes pictures off them and make a 3D image of them: