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I’m a PhD student in my third year of studying Genetics. That means I only have a year and a half left to finish my work – eep! I work at the University of Liverpool, which is also where I studied Microbiology. That’s the great thing about science – so many areas overlap that you can start off studying one thing and then move onto another later! As long as you have the enthusiasm, you can try quite a lot of different things.

So my work lets me look at a horrible microbe called Entamoeba histolytica. It infects millions of people in the world and kills 100,000 people every year! There are a few other species called ‘Entamoeba something‘ that are really closely related to E. histolytica – they’re kind of like its cousins. The difference is that they don’t harm people. What I’m trying to do is look at the DNA of each of these species and work out which parts (or ‘genes’) of E. histolytica‘s DNA are different to the DNA of its cousins. Any genes that are different in E. histolytica might be responsible for making it dangerous.

My days are spent doing one of two things:

1) I go in the lab and mash up Entamoeba cells so that I can pull out their DNA, so that it can be ‘read’ by a machine. This lab work’s really interesting but is quite dangerous because I need to use chemicals that could knock me out if I sniff them too much! I got a nasty headache once but I’ve not passed out…yet! Once I have the DNA, I need to prepare it so that it’s clean and ready to be read.

2) I work on a computer, writing small programs to pull apart data from the DNA reader. This is great – I feel like a computer hacker in a spy TV show! The only problem is the DNA reader gives me a LOT of data. So I spend most days trying to dig down to find the important bits that will tell me which genes let E. histolytica cause disease. That’s not easy – it’s kind of like trying to find your pen if your entire classroom was filled with pens! That said, I find out loads of interesting things about the species as I’m doing this – the amount you can learn from a species’ DNA really is incredible!