Now out on bioRxiv: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.01.12.575349, using chicken embryos as a model system, we investigated how the embryonic brain expands and departs in morphology from the spinal cord early in development. The neural tube is the embryonic precursor of the central nervous system and has a positive fluid pressure within its lumen (Desmond et al. 2005). By perturbing lumen pressure early in development, we found that it drives thinning of the hindbrain dorsal tissue and brain expansion, whilst the spinal cord resists the pressure and holds its shape. We investigated the mechanical properties of the hindbrain and spinal cord using ferrofluid …
Author: susiemclaren
Fun contribution to a cool engineering project – now preprinted on TechRxiv
Great to see this really cool paper out, exploring how sustainable bioelectronic fibres can be printed on different biological structures and used to sense properties of living organisms. https://www.techrxiv.org/doi/full/10.36227/techrxiv.24324106.v1
Postdoctoral research begins
Time has flown by since finishing my PhD and I am now well into my first year of postdoc. So far it’s been fun to work on a new model system (the chicken embryo), have a go at some set-up engineering, and develop new methods to investigate the forces involved in early central nervous system morphogenesis.
PhD paper is out
I’m attempting to catch up on things after a long pause from updating my website. First up – my PhD paper was published on BioRxiv and then in a special issue of Development. In this paper we investigated how the morphogenesis of one tissue can physically deform its neighbouring tissues to contribute to the elongation of the embryo head-to-tail axis. Using targeted multi-photon ablations I disrupted notochord morphogenesis by preventing the expansion of notochord vacuoles. Surprisingly segmentation-associated posterior body elongation was robust to near-complete notochord ablation. However, we found that notochord vacuole expansion facilitates the elongation of the axis at …
The Role of Mitotic Cell-Substrate Adhesion Re-modeling in Animal Cell Division
Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.devcel.2018.03.009
5 simple tips for PhD interviews
‘Tis the season for PhD programme interviews and I’ve recently been asked by a few people for advice on how best to prepare, so I thought I’d share a few tips that might be useful for you to reflect on if you are in the process of prepping for your interview. It doesn’t feel like that long ago when I was getting ready to head off to interviews for PhD programmes. My first interview was in Cambridge. I was pretty nervous as I’d had a pretty disastrous interview experience a few years before when I’d applied to Cambridge Uni for …
3 months in
I am about 3 months into my PhD now, so I thought I’d give an update on what it’s been like up to now. So far I’ve mostly learnt things about myself and the way I work best, rather than anything to do with understanding a scientific question. I guess that isn’t surprising as I’ve mainly been playing around with different techniques, trying things, and seeing what works. Having the chance to explore different ideas has been great and I think it’s really important to have that kind of opportunity at the beginning of any scientific project. Much of my …
Thoughts on diet and global warming
Everyday in the media I hear about global warming and how it’s connected to the way we live our lives. Whilst it’s easy for me to believe that there is a link between what we consume (food, technology, leisure, etc) and the decreasing health of the planet, I have realised that I’m not very educated on the subject. I think one of the reasons I find it tricky to understand what influences what when it comes to global warming and human behaviour is simply that…it’s not a simple problem to study. Why? Well, human behaviour is studied at many different …
Starting a PhD
As the British Summer (?) comes to an end and the air becomes (even) crisper, the start of a new academic year is signalled. For the past four years the start of my year has coincided with October rather than January, simply because thats when term time starts at university. This year will be my last to start in October. PhD’s are full time, and whilst they are not classed as employment in the UK, they have most* of the features of a full time job. Choosing to do a science based PhD used to require you to have a …
London to Cambridge
Over the past year I’ve graduated from university, moved town, and embarked on a PhD, so there’s a lot to catch up on. I scraped through the last year of my natural sciences BSc at University College London (UCL), feeling fed up with cramming quantum mechanics equations and biochemical signalling pathways into my head and ready to get on with something I was passionate about. I had decided to apply to PhD programmes the previous year after undertaking a 2 month research internship in Buzz Baum’s lab at UCL, which persuaded me that scientific research was what I wanted to …