Profile

I live in Aberdeen and study at the University of Aberdeen. I’m interested in astrology and love reading about the different star signs and how these can affect who you are as a person! I love being by the sea and I find marine organisms to be absolutely fascinating (deep-sea creatures in particular.) At the moment, I have a slight addiction to Animal Crossing – it helps me to relax after a hard day of working away at my desk!

My work includes studying marine invertebrates, such as corals, sponges, sea snails etc, to see if they produce interesting chemicals with biological activities. This activity could be anticancer activity, antibacterial, antifungal and so on. In my case, I look for chemicals which could be used to stop bacteria and bigger organisms like barnacles and mussels from settling on man-made structures under the sea, specially oil and gas rigs.

The reason we don’t want these organisms to grow on the legs of oil and gas rigs is because they are very difficult to remove when carrying out routine cleanups and it also costs a lot of money to remove them. I can’t imagine it being very pleasant for the organisms during the removal process either! So if we can stop them from settling in the first place, then we will save oil and gas companies money and not have to disturb the organisms since they won’t be growing there anymore – everyone will be happy!

When I start with a new sample, I need to cut it up into tiny pieces first. This means that when I add my solvent to the tissue, the liquid will be able to reach more of the nooks and crannies and hopefully draw out as many chemicals as possible which are stored inside the tissue of the organism I’m working with.

This is me cutting a sample of a soft coral into small pieces using a very sharp scalpel!

Next, I need to leave the sample in a bottle with a suitable solvent in order to allow the chemicals inside the tissue to be extracted. This is left for 24 hours then I repeated a few more times. After this is complete, the tissue can be put in the bin as the liquid should now contain a lot of the chemicals from inside of the organism tissue!

The liquid extract at this point is very complicated as it will contain hundreds of different molecules of varying sizes with different structures. Because of this, we need to use lots of different separation techniques in order to break the sample down into lots of more simple samples which we call fractions.

We repeat this process over and over until we are left with just one compound which looks to be a new molecule which has never been discovered before! Since it is new we then need to use lots of data analyses to figure out the structure of our new molecule and then test it to see if it has any interesting biological activity!

I can’t complete all of these tasks in the same day (experiments can take a long time to run) but these are some examples of the tasks I might carry out on a day to day basis.