Question: I would love to understand more about your experiments!

Jemma Ransom answered on 22 Mar 2011:

Then I will tell you about them!

The mainstay of my work is culturing neurons (brain cells) from the mouse brain – I use this as a model for how human neurons work. I then use an imaging technique called immunohistochemistry to detect proteins inside the cells that are related to how vitamin A is processed by brain cells. This is a really cool technique and you can see a photo of one of my cells on my profile page. Basically I introduce a flourescent probe to the cell that only recognises the shape of the protein that I am interested in. This binds to the protein if the cell has it, and I can detect this using flourescent light. This is really useful as knowledge about what proteins a cell has allows me to make conclusions about what the cell does. For example, if the cell has proteins that allow it to breakdown vitamin A, I know that it uses this molecule for some function, and I can investigate further what it is doing.

Hope this answers your question, if you want to know anything else just let me know.