A growing team of groundbreaking scientists around the world are now sharing their lab notebooks online
It’s never too late to take another look at your data. The incredibly knowledgeable Sally Cowley suggested that I shouldn’t just think about how many cells contain any AlexFluor488 antibody after electroporation, but how bright each cell is (i.e. the amplitude of fluorescence). Looking at this instead will give me an idea of how much Read More …
As soon as possible I’m hoping to use CRISPR/Cas9 genetic editing to make sets of DIPG patient cells that differ only in one gene (either with/without the whole gene or with/without mutations of interest). This will allow me to make far more accurate comparisons of behaviour between the cells in relation to specific genes or Read More …
Stem cells are a set of cells that, unlike most cells in the body, can divide as many times as they want, and can turn into any cell in the body. The mutations in cancer often make the cells behave more like stem cells, because in order to grow into a large tumour they may Read More …
Did you know as many as 30% of the cells in labs could be misidentified? And what a nightmare it would be to find out years of your work are just completely wrong because you got your skin cells mixed up with your brain cells… So to avoid that catastrophe, I took some time to Read More …
Further down the line I want to be able to test the activation of the BMP signalling pathway downstream of the ALK2 receptor. For this I plan to use the alkaline phosphatase gene as a readout – it’s a well known gene activated downstream of BMP signalling so a lot of easy to use assays Read More …
Hi there! The last month of my life was taken over by making sure my PhD first year report was beautifully polished, but I have returned with results of a small compound screen: These are all compounds that Jong Fu has already tested with his assays so we know they effectively inhibit ACVR1, but I Read More …
Every summer my department holds a special mini-conference for the DPhil (aka PhD) students so that we can get to know each other and practice presenting our research. This year I took along a poster outlining my own project – Understanding the pathogenic mechanism of ACVR1 mutations in Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma – and presented Read More …
I don’t just want to check whether the compounds I’m testing kill DIPG cells, I want to check that they’re doing this by altering BMP signalling too. However, I can’t do this with the DIPG cells, because if a compound does work, and kill them, there’ll be no cell left to actually measure the amount Read More …
Hello there! This week I won’t be filling you in on my latest experiment, because instead I spent three days at the first ever Cancer Research UK Brain Tumour Conference held in the Royal Society of Medicine in London! (Also the biggest conference I’ve been to so far). The conference gathered over 30 great speakers Read More …
It’s usually a good idea to have more than one trick up your sleeve… So with that in mind, I’ve started developing another viability assay for my DIPG cell lines. The first assay relied on convincing a cell line that naturally grows as floating spheres to grow stuck down on the bottom of plastic wells, Read More …
