Pyruvate dehydrogenase E2 complex

Schools’ Day 2012

The programme for the 2012 Schools' Day included a quiz, a number of workshops, posters and several talks on the theme of Big to small:

Talk abstracts

Embryos and evolution: where does the sternum come from?

Sorrel Bickley - final year PhD student in Developmental Biology

Different vertebrate species use a wide range of modes of locomotion, from walk-ing on four legs, hopping on two legs, or even flying in the air, and the skeleton and muscles must be specifically adapted to support each range of movements. A bone with a particularly interesting role in locomotion in vertebrates is the sternum, a thin flat bone that sits at the middle of the ribcage. The sternum acts as an anchor point for the pectoral muscles, providing the strength to move the arms forward and lift the body up from the ground (a movement like doing a press up). Species with different locomotion modes use their arms in different ways and so have evolved different shapes and sizes of their sterna. As part of my project I am study-ing how and why the sternum changes in shape – including why dodos have very different sterna to hummingbirds!

Another interesting feature of the sternum is how it forms in the embryo. It begins as two bands of cartilage on opposite sides of the body, next to the forelimbs. The-se bands then migrate towards one another and fuse at the midline. I want to un-derstand how these bands form, and so I have also been experimenting on chicken embryos using cell labelling techniques and try to understand where the cells of the sternum come from. I am also exploring the link between the forelimbs and the sternum further, by using transgenic mice that are missing a gene which means that they completely fail to form forelimbs and a sternum. If we can understand what is going wrong in these mice, we can understand what is needed in the embryo to make a normal sternum and forelimbs.

Connectomics - the brain as an organic Facebook

Ede Rancz - postdoctoral researcher in Neurophysiology

The brain consists of billions of cells, called neurons. Each of them are forming thousands of connections to other neurons. These connections are used to transfer information between cells, allowing us to feel, move and think.

I will introduce a new area of brain research called connectomics. The goal of con-nectomics is to map the connections between each neuron in the brain, to build the so called connectome (cf. genome). Every individual's connectome is unique and changing all the time, according to our experiences. I will discuss techniques used for connectomics, some results and parallels between humans and neurons, the brain and society.

Adapting large scale science with short read sequencing to a small academic facility

Abdul Sesay - genomics core facility

The idea of reading the sequence of bases in DNA indicates the breath-taking ambi-tion of molecular biology. When scientists in the 1970s took the small step that enabled them to determine the order of say 200 bases, it took extraordinary imagi-nation to envisage sequencing the entire human genome (3 billion bases). Howev-er, this vision became reality with the aid of automatic machines that could read 800 base stretches of random sequence and computers that could assemble these “reads” into a linear sequence. This culminated in the publication of the human genome sequence in 2000, which showed our genomes encoded 25,000 proteins, more than half of which were previously unknown.

Another huge advance came with the invention of high-throughput sequencing. This involved a miniaturized process that allowed many molecules to be sequenced simultaneously, in a system invented by Professor Shankar Balasubramanian of Cambridge University, (which he sold to the American Company Illumina). The process conducted millions of se-quencing reactions simultaneously on tiny fragments of DNA fixed to a glass slide. The sequence information comes from nucleotides that fluoresce (emit light) when they are added to chains and the light is recorded by an exceptionally fast camera, then a stupendous computing process assembles the entire sequence. This means previously unknown genomes will be sequenced extremely quickly and it will become so cheap that accurate diagnosis of many kinds of disease will become rou-tine. The sequence of all the messenger RNA in an individual cell-type can now be made using cDNA copies. This is another revolutionary technique that will give inti-mate information about the differences between every cell type.

 

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