Profile

Hi! I’m Annabel I’m 24 and at the moment I currently am living back home with family in Leeds, but usually I live in Cambridge where I study how organisms start with flat sheets of cells and how they turn into fully formed organs!

I’m a second year PhD student carrying out single cell sequencing on the fruit fly embryo. I specifically look at the developing salivary gland cells to see if I can find any interesting genes responsible for its development. Fruit flies and their embryos are a brilliant model for looking at how tissues bend because it’s very simple model with a small group fo cells (200 per embryo)  that don’t divide or die so the only way they can change from a flat single sheet of cells into a 3D organ is through changing their size, their shape and who their neighbours are.

Here are some pictures of the tiny fruit fly eggs I work on, they’re very hard to see with the naked eye so we usually have to use microscopes to see them:

I get up early and cycle into work. At the moment I am analysing my sequencing data to identify interesting patterns of genes. However, a usual day in the lab will see me collecting embryos that are genetically engineered to have salivary glands that glow bright green collect embryos that are at the right age before dissociating them into single cells to take to a machine that will sort them into cells that glow bright green and cells that don’t. The cells that glow bright green are the cells I am interested in. I then send these cells away for sequencing to see what kind of genes are being expressed.