Profile

My names is Theresa and I am originally from Germany, but I moved to Aberdeen in 2018 and then moved to Exeter in 2019. There, I now live with my boyfriend.
I love to climb, both outdoors and indoors, am an enthusiastic skier (not so much in Devon, though), do acrobatics, am known for cycling everywhere in any weather and occasionally go for a run. Other than that I enjoy discovering England, Scotland and the world. Sometimes you can find me bouncing around in mosh pits on metal concerts.
Any bready food (naan, pizza, flatbreads etc.) is not safe from me and will immediately be exterminated (eaten).
I am a dog lover (cats are great, too, though).
Recently, I discovered that I really enjoy Star Trek. Other fandoms include The Expanse, Firefly, several Anime (series) and Mass Effect.
My pronouns are she/her.

I am currently working as a Bioinformatician. What we as bioinformaticians do is we look at biological data, DNA sequences and such, on a computer, analyse that data and then try to understand what that tells us about the organism the DNA, for instance, comes from. The exciting bit is not only that you actually get to write code (I am terrible at it, but I am learning), but that you can suddenly make sense of different bits of information that come together to form a picture – and explain why for instance one bug is able to infect an organism as well as it does. I look at Cryptococcus species, which are a type of yeast/ fungus that infects human. Specifically, I look at Cryptococcus neoformans, who normally infects the lungs but in people who have other underlying diseases it can infect the brain as well.
When Crypto infects humans, it, among other things, changes its shape. I look at how this is regulated on an epigenetic and genomic level. What does that mean?
Imagine the DNA as an encyclopaedia (many books) of instructions. That is the genomic level. Some pages can be copied (the process of transcription) and will be used to build things (translation, part of biosynthesis), others may not be copied or have pages that are not instructions to build things but something different etc.. That is the genomic level: looking at the encyclopaedia, where things are copied and what they build, who is operating the copying machine…
Now, imagine some books of this encyclopaedia a locked away in cabinets (wrapped tightly around proteins called histones). Some are not. The cabinets have locks (histone modifications) and little white boards. Depending on what is written on these white boards, a guy comes (the histone modifying enzyme) and either locks these cabinets or opens them up, so they can be taken out and copied. Whether or not they are accessible, depends on whether the cabinet is locked or not and whether that guy with the keys has just opened or closed the lock. That is epigenetics. The cabinets with the books inside are called chromatin. Chromatin can be accessible – euchromatin – or silenced (locked). That is called heterochromatin.  It is not about the pages in the books itself (the genome), but how they are packed away…or in open shelves to be copied.
I try to understand the guys with the keys (chromatin modifying enzymes), what needs to be written on the white board to open or close a cabinet and also why some cabinets are closed or opened when the fungus gets into our body (changes in chromatin landscape during infection).