Meet the scientists!

Cells are the building blocks of your body. Every cell has DNA, which is the instuctions telling the cells what to do. You’ve probably all heard that smoking and too much sunbathing can cause cancer. The reason they can is because they can damage your cells’ DNA. This lead to your cells receieving ‘wrong’ instructions. This  can lead to cancer. Its important therefore to fix your DNA when it gets damaged. The question I’m trying to answer is how cells know their DNA is damaged, and how they fix it.

 I tend to arrive anytime between 8 and 10 depending on how early I need to get experiments started and how late I went to bed the evening before! I spend most of my day ‘at the bench’ which means wearing a white labcoat. I grow cells which have come from tumours in big incubators. Most of my experiments last a couple of days, so I tend to juggle doing a few at once. A standard experiment I do a lot has several stages:

First of all I’ll spend two days turning off specific genes in the cancer cells. Then once thats done, I’ll add chemicals to the cells to damage their DNA. Then, I spent two days staining the different parts of the DNA and things in the cell that repair the proteins differnt colours. Finally, I look at the cells (in their multi-coloured glory!) under a microscope to see how well they are repairing their DNA (and therefore if the genes I turned off at the beginning are needed to repair the DNA). 

I also might go to a seminar (a talk from a visiting scientist about their work), have a meeting with my boss, spend a while reading experiments other people have done, plus my cells need to be fed and put into new containers every other day….

When scientists talk about conferences, they mean when groups of scientists from all over the world, that research similar areas of science, get together to talk about their work. Scientists give talks, and I know that all sounds a little boring it is actually very useful and interesting to hear other peoples ideas! People tend to be pretty friendly, and they’re normally held in places you’d want to visit anyway.