• Question: If you have done already, what did you do for your dissertation?

    Asked by csharps to Alex, Amy, Andy, Georgia, Ollie on 14 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Alex Munro

      Alex Munro answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      For my BSc (Human Nutrition) I did my dissertation on the sodium/glucose co-transporter – this little protein is responsible for the shunting of glucose & galactose from the intestinal lumen into our cells. I chose this transporter bc mutations in the gene encoding for it resulted in an interesting disease called glucose-galactose malabsorption.

      I characterized the gene (SLC5A1) and amplified it by Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR); the experiment didn’t work, but I learnt loads and thoroughly enjoyed it!!

      For my Masters I did a dissertation entitled Dietary Patterns in the Family Food and Health Study. I had never done anything like this before, but as it required the use of statistical techniques (like Principal Components Analysis) and a large study (just like my PhD), it gave me some useful skills, experience and the confidence I needed to tackle my PhD…

    • Photo: Amy Reeve

      Amy Reeve answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi

      For my BSc (neuroscience) my dissertation was on the phenomena of Phantom limbs. Phantom limbs are sensations that amputees experience coming from their missing limb. I investigated how these sensations arise and whether people with limbs missing from birth also experienced them

      For my PhD my thesis was on ‘The molecular basis of neurodegeneration’. I looked at how changes in the DNA within mitochondria might lead to cell death. 🙂

    • Photo: Georgia Campbell

      Georgia Campbell answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      For my BSc (Human genetics), I did a project on characterising cancer stem cells in prostate cancer – trying to look at what proteins they express, what percentage of cancer cells they make up, where they are found and what they do! I wrote my dissertation on this.

      Cancer stem cells are thought to be the cells that keep growing and dividing to make tumours grow; they’re very important, and really interesting to study 🙂

      It’s not long now till I’ll have to think about starting on my PhD final thesis, which is a bit of a scary though though!

    • Photo: Ollie Russell

      Ollie Russell answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      For my BSc (Pharmacology) I looked at the effects of pesticides on human cells. We looked for things called micronuclei which are caused when a cell doesnt split its DNA exqually during division. This is the same thing that can cause Downs syndrome.

      Using blood and urine from Bolivian farmers, we found that some pesticides do cause these changes.

    • Photo: Andy MacLeod

      Andy MacLeod answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      For my Masters dissertation in ‘Quantitative Genetics and Genome Analysis”, I wrote about new techniques we were using to detect genes for sleeping sickness resistance in mice. Sleeping sickness is a terrible disease that effects large parts of Africa. I looked at the DNA of mice who were resistant to the disease, compared to those who weren’t, and looked for genes that were different between those two groups. If we could find genes in mice, that would maybe give some clues what the human equivalents are.

      My PhD thesis was also based around animal genetics, but from a more theoretical perspective. I was using computer models to simulate inbreeding in livestock populations. Farm animals often undergo extensive artificial selection – so that cows can make more milk, chickens lay more eggs etc, but that can lead to inbreeding. When close relatives are mated together, this can be bad for the offsrping as it makes them more likely to have genetic diseases. I was looking at the patterns of gene inheritance in models of livestock populations, so we could try and detect the extent of inbreeding in each individual animal.

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