Hello again!,

I thought I would give you a bit more insight into the life of a PhD student.

As well as working on my current project, I have recently also been working with Karl and Ben (who I did my last rotation with) writing up the work that I did with them into a paper. For each of our rotations we had to write a report and this paper has been an improved version of that so it is very exciting thinking that soon my work could be in print! Although I am no longer working in their lab, I am just across the corridor so it is easy to pop over and get everything sorted during a (well, many!) coffee break (and of course it is good to continue to collaborate).

Writing up a paper is quite a slow process as there are three of us working on it, so there were many, many corrections and changes in grammar (literally arguing over commas!) before we were all happy! We have sent it now to Ratko Djukanovic (I have just noticed that there is a link on the AAIR website to a page about Ratko so you can see who I mean!) who is the boss of their lab (as well as the research division) for his approval and comments. He will be able to guide us with regards to which journal he thinks it would be most appropriate for, and of course has the final editorial approval. This is the first time I have written a paper and it has been a very interesting process. I can't get too excited yet because you have to go though many stages of approval before it is published, but I sometimes can't help myself!

In December I was lucky enough to be able to attend the British Thoracic Society conference in London. There were many interesting talks and I was able to meet other researchers in my field. This was especially useful because some of the talks I went to were on EMT (epithelial to mesenchymal transition – the idea is that in the right situation epithelial cells (the ones lining your airways) can change into more structural muscle-like cells) research. This is what the paper is about, so I was able to ask questions to find out exactly what other people in the field are doing at the moment and how their research fits in with ours.

Anyway, I had better get on with some lab work and feed my cells,

Will update you all soon,

Gem XOXO   more »

Hello!

It has been a very busy few months up in the Brooke Laboratories. I officially started my PhD project in October and have been working almost non-stop ever since! I am working closely with a research fellow within the lab called Lynn Andrews, who is my main supervisor and so far it is going very well. We had not worked together before, however as part of my undergraduate course in Biochemistry and Pharmacology at Southampton I had lectures from Lynn, and it was these lectures which first made me very interested in asthma research. Each PhD student has at least 2 supervisors and my other one is Professor Donna Davies, who I worked closely with during my MRes year, which means that we already have a good working relationship.

The project I am doing is an extension of one of the rotation projects I did last year, so I have been able to jump straight back into it, and was even able to get an abstract (a short summary of my current work - which you then extend into either a poster or a short presentation at a conference) in for the American Thoracic Society conference which is in San Diego in May. It is extremely unusual to be able to get an abstract done within a month of starting your PhD but because of having the MRes year under my belt I was able to do it (though granted there were many late nights in October!). I have also spent this week putting in more abstracts for a national conference in Loughborough in March. It is very important that I attend conferences and get my research out there as a student as it not only helps me with my career but also so that others know what research is currently being done.

I have really enjoyed starting my 3 year project, especially because it is my project so I can have input in how I do things and which areas I focus on. Because I have a year of full time lab experience and have learnt many new techniques I have been able to make use of this. One of the main things I have been able to bring to the project is my experience using something called a FACS machine. For this you label your protein of interest with a dye and when you run it though the machine it uses lasers to detect the dye and therefore how much of your protein is within a sample (so you can see whether a treatment with a drug for example will change the amount of your protein of interest). This has been very useful because we would like to characterise the cells that I am using and this is a fantastic way of doing that, but not many people in the Brooke Labs use FACS (their work tends to focus on other things) so it would have been much harder to do without this experience.

I hope that you are all having a great 2009

Gem x

Hello I hope everyone had a good Christmas and new year, I did.

I got the funding that I needed to go on the course to France. It was very interesting and gave me lots of ideas which should help me remove any biased that I many have had in my results. The course was held in La Rochelle which is right by the sea. The gala dinner, which was part of the course, was held in a seafood restaurant. We had oysters, shrimp, langoustine and snails for a starter and then a fillet of local fish on a bed of noodles. It was all very nice, however after fours days of seafood I was really craving chips and steak!

I have stained and pictured three lungs and done some repeat assays on gene expression that was done by Mat, the other PhD student in the lab, before I started. This is the data that I am hoping to have analysed and will be able to include in my 6 month report.