Monday, October 26, 2015

Hello interwebs!

Hello All,

Welcome to my blog, this is my first time blogging so bear with me as I recount my tales of scientific endeavour and exploration of the mighty city of Los Angeles!

I'm one very lucky grad student, who with five months left to complete my PhD at the University of Oxford, has come to L.A. to undertake a fantastic 2-month project working with collaborators at the University of Southern California (USC). Back home at Oxford my research has focused on elucidating the role of a crucial protein, called Scl, in the formation of blood and blood vessels as a vertebral embryo grows.  Without Scl mice embryos die of anaemia as the blood doesn't form and blood vessels fail to properly join together to make an ordered circulation system.  This shows how important this protein must be in the complex process of producing a fully functional circulatory system.  Interestingly in humans having too much of Scl in certain immune cells causes them to multiply out of control and leads to T-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia , a devastating form of blood cancer.

I have being trying to work out how Scl functions at early stages of the growth of zebrafish embryos, this is within 1 day of the eggs being fertilised.  Scl and the other factors it has so far been shown to interact with, are very similar and seem to act in the same fashion in zebrafish as in humans.  This means that anything we can learn in zebrafish is likely to be relevant to treating human conditions.  Studying how a single fertilised egg develops into a fully formed adult creature, is not only interesting for furthering our understanding of life, but also has potentially huge medical benefits.  If we can work out the necessary steps for a whole organism to arise from a single cell, maybe we can partially reverse it.  Many diseases are linked to ageing, such as cancer, Alzheimer's, COPD and certain organ failures. If we can understand how factors such as Scl are involved in the formation and maintenance of crucial tissues, such as blood vessels, we could potentially use the correct combination of drugs to promote growth or healing of crucial blood vessels.

So over the next few weeks I will try to explain how the research I am undertaking out here in sunny L.A. will help us progress towards a better understanding of how Scl functions in vivo (in living animals).  Hopefully this will be interesting for you and will certainly help me organise my thoughts for writing up my research into a thesis!

Till tomorrow, 
TTFN (Ta-ta-for-now = goodbye)

L

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