For
the love of Muscles!
Nicole
Beard
I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Muscle
Research Group at the John Curtin School of Medical
Research, at the Australian National University.
My research is of a biochemical, molecular and biophysical
nature. The research interests of the group I’m a member of
include investigating the cellular mechanisms of how
a muscle works, ie muscle contraction. Some of the
precise cellular mechanisms and protein -protein interactions
that precede muscle contraction are not well understood, and
these are areas we target.
Today, I was in the lab early, to start the day before everyone
arrives, this is my time to really get some things set up
and done. I collected some results from an immunoprecipitation
experiment that had been running for the past few weeks. These
experiments look at interactions between proteins
found in the muscle cell, and I was a pleased to
note the results, which shall be used eventually in a paper
to be published.
My source of muscle proteins are mostly recombinant,
and we have some of these expressed in a bacterial cell line.
I had grown the cells yesterday, so today’s task was to resuspend
the cells in some buffer, to burst the cells under pressure,
and collect the cell contents, which included expressed protein.
At the moment, I am learning a new technique
to express proteins, so in between my bacterial cell work,
I worked with a colleague to determine mammalian cell growth
and watching how he separates and purifies the cells we want
from the spent growth media.
The cells have a green fluorescent tag attached to them, so
it was great too see lots of these tags under the confocal
microscope. Lots of fluorescence = good cell growth! Boring
for some, but exciting for me as this is an important cell
line for the future of my project.
Lunch was on the run today, as I wanted to get home early
to see my son and my mother who had come to visit. In the
afternoon I had a meeting with a new PhD student to discuss
progress of a project and general methodology. Progress
is being made on her project.
We also discussed some future directions and what she would
like to do with her project. Then I had a meeting with my
boss, to let her know of progresses that are being made, and
discussed my preparation of a presentation to be given at
a conference we shall attend in June.
I had some finishing touches to be made to
a paper that we are resubmitting to a journal
– fingers crossed that our changes meet the reviewer’s requests.
This included fiddling with some diagrams and dotting i’s
and crossing t’s, to make sure that the paper is as good grammatically
and aesthetically as we think it is scientifically! These
kinds of things are quite fiddly and take a fair bit of the
time, but well worth it in the end (paper did get accepted!).
For the last few hours of the day, I purified the
protein of interest (calsequestrin) from my bacterial
cell culture using affinity chromotography, determined protein
concentration, and froze the protein for use tomorrow.
I left work around 6 pm, bound for home.
This is a typical day for me, with part of the day being spent
in the lab doing preparation work and experimental
work, with the other part of the day doing paper work.
Preparation work does take up a larger proportion of time
than ideal, but the source of protein for experiments has
to come from somewhere! It is satisfying when all this work
leads to great experimental results.
In high school, I had an interest in biology and
legal studies, but dropped biology in my
final year to concentrate on bringing my results up in core
subjects. I didn’t get the marks to get into law, so I chose
to study science.
At University, I majored in biochemistry and physiology and
in my second year physiology class, I went to a lecture on
muscle physiology. Any thoughts of genetics or microbiology
as a career were quashed, as I was officially in love
with muscle!
After finishing my bachelor degree, I did honours in (you
guessed it) muscle physiology and realized that research was
for me. I completed my PhD at the John Curtin School of Medical
Research, spent some time working in the USA, before coming
back to the John Curtin School of Medical Research, where
I am home!
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