Profile

Hi, I’m Rebecca and I’m a 25 year-old PhD student at Birkbeck College and UCL. I live in London and have been for the last two years, but I did my undergraduate degree in Chemistry at the University of Bristol.

Outside of my PhD, my hobbies are yoga, playing the guitar and I like to read a lot.

I work on an enzyme (a protein which can perform chemical reactions). This protein is found in a plant and makes a medicine called norcoclaurine, which has lots of different medicinal activities such as relaxing muscles and helping to stop blood to clot.

Enzymes are interesting to scientists to make medicines as they are better for the environment. Normally medicines are made using lots of toxic chemicals and high temperatures which isn’t very sustainable!

In plants, the enzyme makes this molecule by reacting two other molecules together, these two reacting molecules are known as substrates. One aspect of my work is to see what other substrates we can get the enzyme to accept, so to make other molecules which are similar to norcoclaurine which might have useful benefits in medicine.

My enzyme is a protein, which means it is made up of a sequence of different, joined together amino acids. The amino acids each have different shapes and functions and so the sequence of these amino acids determines the structure and function of the protein.

One aspect of what I do is look at the structure of my enzyme (using x-ray crystallography) and from there, it gives us an idea of what amino acids of the enzyme we can change. The hope is that we can change some of the amino acids to help change the way the enzyme reacts and make new molecules that are useful towards discovering new medicines.

My days can be very varied depending on what sort of area of my PhD I’m working on, but here is a description of one of my days last week.

9-9.30 am: I arrive in the lab and check on any experiments I had running overnight.

9.30 am – 12:30 pm : I am using organic chemistry at the moment to make a variety of substrates to test with my enzyme. I set up a new chemical reaction and I purify another molecule that I synthesised yesterday. I also run an NMR of the reaction that I ran overnight. This is just a technique we use which gives us some data which we can use to determine what small molecules we have in a reaction mixture.

12:30 pm – 1:00 pm : I sit at my desk and have lunch. I usually use this time to check my emails and check whether my reactions have worked from overnight.

1:00 – 3:00 pm : I head over to the other lab I work in which focuses on x-ray crystallography. I am currently trying to get a structure of my enzyme with a molecule in the active site. I check to see whether I have any new crystals and set up some new crystallisation plates.

3:00-6:00 pm: I finish off any of the chemistry experiments I was doing in the morning, read a  paper or two, or maybe do some data analysis and then head home!