Profile

When I was at school I desperately wanted to be a vet and so I went to Bristol Vet School for university.  While there I got really interested in diseases that we can catch from animals and that animals can catch from us (these are called zoonoses).  I am now a qualified vet but have chosen to do a PhD to learn more about one specific bacterial species we can catch from animals: Campylobacter jejuni.

Generally  we catch this from eating raw/undercooked chicken or from other food that has been contaminated by raw chicken.  It can give us really nasty vomiting and diarrhoea (lasting for days!)  It can also (thankfully much more rarely) trigger longer term conditions that affect our nerves and cause paralysis.

Although the bacteria cause disease in us they don’t apparently cause disease in chickens – they live quite happily in the chickens’ guts until the birds go for slaughter.  My PhD involves looking at how they survive so happily in a chicken’s guts and why they are not kicked out by the chicken’s immune system.

I probably spend the majority of my day in the lab.  A lot of this time it’s not very glamorous work – lots of labelling of tubes and dishes, lots of moving tiny volumes of liquids from one tube to another – but it’s all worth it when I get the results.

Over the course of my PhD I haven’t really stuck to one type of experiment – I am using lots of different types to try to pin down some of the ways my bacteria behave which makes it a little tricky to describe a ‘typical day’ in the lab because what I do changes from day to day but to give you some idea…

I spend rather a lot of time working with chicken poo!  I put some of the poo (often diluted) on agar plates and then come back 2 days later and count the number of clumps of bacteria that are growing to give me an idea of how many the chicken was carrying.  (Agar is a bit like jelly and it provides nutrients that allow the bacteria to grow.  It is allowed to set in flat circular dishes called ‘petri dishes’ and then we spread a sample that has bacteria on it.  The bacteria will grow and you will see clumps of them on the plates – called colonies – and sometimes I need to count how many there are.) 

I also currently have some cells growing in an incubator (because they need to be kept warm) in the lab.  I will look at these every day to check that they are growing properly and that they have not got infected.  I also have to feed them several times a week with a special liquid that contains lots of nutrients.  When the cells are ready I will deliberately infect them with Campylobacter to see what the bacteria do and how the cells respond.

When not in the lab I have to put my results onto the computer so that I can analyse the results and then make some graphs.   I also try to write up my experiments as I go along.

I will also check pretty much every day to see if anything new has been published in my area of work.  (Science results get published in journals and different journals publish on different days so it is always worth a quick check.)  I will read any papers that look interesting.

Finally, if I have some time at the end of the day I will check out some of the science blogs I follow and the Microbiology Societies’ facebook pages and Twitter feeds.