Profile
Ed Tunnacliffe
My CV
-
Education:
Secondary school: Bottisham Village College 2003-2008
Sixth Form: Hills Road Sixth Form College 2008-2010
University: Durham University 2010-2013
PhD: University College London (UCL) 2013-2017 -
Qualifications:
GCSEs: Maths, Science, Additional Science, English Lang., English Lit., Geography, History, French, P.E.
A levels: Biology, Chemistry, Maths, Further Maths
AS levels: Psychology
BSc (undergraduate degree): Cell Biology
PhD (postgraduate degree): Molecular Cell Biology -
Work History:
Shop assistant: 2008-2009
Bar staff: 2010-2013
Postdoctoral scientist, UCL, London: 2018
-
About Me:
Hi, I’m Ed! I’m a postdoctoral researcher living in London. I love playing football, reading books, and cooking my favourite foods (and then eating them of course!).
-
Read more
I live in West London with my girlfriend. We like to do gardening and have lots of plants both inside our flat and outside in our little garden – currently I am growing some sunflowers from seed! My favourite football team is Leeds United even though I was born in Cambridge. My girlfriend is from Poland so I am trying to learn to speak Polish: “Miło mi cię poznać” (it means “Nice to meet you”!). I have coeliac disease so I cannot eat things like normal pizza or pasta, which can be frustrating but it means I need to be more creative in the kitchen!
-
Read more
In order to make a living organism, like you or me, genes (which hold the instructions for an organism) need to be switched on and off at different times as the plant or animal grows. The activation (switching on) of a gene is called ‘transcription’ and this is the first step in making a protein. This process normally works really well in our bodies and therefore we grow and develop normally. However, sometimes things go wrong and this can cause diseases (like cancer) to occur. Therefore, it is really important to understand how transcription occurs normally in our cells, so that we know how to fix it when it goes wrong in diseases.I am interested in a particular gene which holds the instructions for making a protein called alpha-globin. This protein is important for blood cells because it is helps to carry oxygen around the body as one part of a group of proteins called haemoglobin. I am trying to understand how the activity of the alpha-globin gene changes as a cell changes from a stem cell to become a red blood cell. Here is an example from a movie I made of a cell which will eventually become a red blood cell. The cell is the large grey circle in the middle of the four different pictures. I can measure the activity of this gene by looking at how bright the white spot in the middle of the cell is (see red circles). In the first picture the spot is very bright, but it becomes less bright in the next two pictures, before becoming bright again in the last picture. Therefore, for this cell I can say that the activity of the gene is ‘dynamic’ (changes over time) and we think this is important for the process of making a red blood cell in our bodies.
-
My Typical Day:
I get up early to travel from London to Oxford where my lab is. Often I need to feed my cells in the morning to make sure they are growing happily. Then I will spend some time doing some image analysis on the computer or going to meetings. In the afternoon, when the cells are ready, I can start an experiment on the microscope and hopefully collect movies of them doing a process called transcription!
-
Read more
Most of the time when I am growing cells I need to use a piece of equipment called a ‘laminar flow hood’ (see pictures below). This is basically a big cabinet in which the air flowing into it has been cleaned by a special filter so that there are no microorganisms present which could contaminate my cell culture. (Contamination means things like bacteria or yeasts growing in the same dish where I am growing blood cells – this is bad because I want to be sure that the blood cells are happy and they might become unhappy if the bacteria eat all their food!).
Currently, I am working with cells which are originally from a mouse. Like humans, the body of a mouse is typically about 37C and therefore in order to keep these cells happy, we need to keep them at 37C too. I will often spend a lot of my time going in and out of an incubator (see below; basically a big cupboard which is warm and humid) while I prepare cells for experiments.
While cells need to be kept warm and sterile (without contamination) as I described above, for other experiments, such as those working with DNA and RNA molecules, I don’t need to work in flow hood. In these cases I work in our laboratory (see below) where we have lots of machines for making new copies of DNA molecules. Often I want to cut and paste these DNA molecules together to make a new molecule, which I can use to ‘genetically modify’ the cells that I am working with. This is important because it is often the only way to ‘see’ how certain processes within a cell are working. In the photo hopefully you can see we have lots of fridges and freezers in the lab. These are perhaps the most important piece of equipment we have as they make sure that the DNA and RNA (and many other molecules/chemicals that we use to do our work) don’t get damaged over time.
Below is a picture of the microscope I am using most often. There are lots of different types of microscopes for studying different processes in cell biology. This one is called a ‘spinning disk confocal microscope’ and is useful for me because it uses lasers to produce very detailed pictures of my cells, extremely fast. The detail is important because I want to see what is happening in a very tiny part of the cell (the activity of a single gene). The speed is important because I want to make movies of living cells, and if I shine the laser light on them for too long they will die. With this microscope I can study how the gene switches on and off over time.
-
My Interview
-
How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Curious, patient, stubborn
What did you want to be after you left school?
I had no idea!
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Yes sometimes, often for talking too much!
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Christine and the Queens
What's your favourite food?
Pizza
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
Be less judgemental; Read more; Move to another country
Tell us a joke.
I wondered why the frisbee was getting bigger, and then it hit me.
-