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Growing in Plant Biochemistry
Rachel
Huntley
Gene Ontology
My
Past
When I was at school, I was interested in all the
science subjects. For this reason, I chose to take
A-levels in the ‘big three’, Biology, Physics, and Chemistry.
I was pretty good at Biology, mediocre at Chemistry and less
than average at Physics.
As a child, I wanted to follow in my mum’s footsteps
and become a nurse – this was all planned out, and I secured
places at nurse’s training school – until, that is, I visited
my ‘O’ level biology teacher whilst I was taking my ‘A’ levels.
She gave me the idea of doing a degree (which had neither
occurred nor been suggested to me up until that point – good
old Careers Service!).
Inspired (and despite my appalling ‘A’ level
results), I applied for and was accepted onto the Cell and
Molecular Biology course at Oxford Poly (now Oxford Brookes
University). After my BSc, I started a Ph.D.
in Plant Biochemistry at the University of
Cambridge, studying plant growth hormones in oil palm. As
part of this, I got to travel to Malaysia to set up a system
for collecting sap from oil palms.
I then went the post-doc route and spent six years at the
Institute of Biotechnology at Cambridge University studying
the plant cell cycle. I always wanted to
work in the U.S. and took advantage of the fact that I had
a PhD to take another post-doc at the Carnegie Institution
of Washington in California, studying meristem genes in Arabidopsis
thaliana. I had a great time there with my husband; we did
lots of travelling and our daughter
was born there in 2005.
While I was there, I was proactive in looking for opportunities
for future careers. I knew that I did not want to continue
doing bench science, but I wasn’t sure what
I wanted to do. I heard about the Gene Ontology (GO; http://www.geneontology.org)
from a seminar given by Sue Rhee of The Arabidopsis Information
Resource (http://www.arabidopsis.org/).
It sounded like something I might be interested in; so I met
with Sue and discussed what they did, what experience you
need, and how I could get involved. She kindly offered me
a chance to do some voluntary work; so I
spent several hours a week annotating genes using GO.
After about 9 months, they offered me a part-time job, which
was fantastic. It turned out to be a great experience
that helped me get a job in the GO Annotation group (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/GOA/index.html)
here at EBI.
My Job
Curating is very enjoyable as you get to read about
diverse areas of research without
having to do it yourself!
One of the best things is making progress every day
and feeling I am contributing to the scientific community
with every annotation I make. With only three full-time GO
annotators here at EBI, however, we certainly have our work
cut out. I also spend one day a week curating the protein-protein
interactions database IntAct (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/intact/).
The annotations we make for this database are much more involved
than GO annotations; so they take much longer to do.
April 12th 2006 – World Wide Day in
Science
I arrived at work around 9am and,
until 9.30am, I checked my email, which included
several that had been sent overnight from our GO friends in
the US. One email I had to deal with was the IntAct Sanity
Check, which tells us any corrections we have to make to our
protein-protein interaction entries in the database. I only
had one correction; so it only took a minute.
From 9.30am until 12noon,
I did GO annotation, which involves reading published scientific
papers and gleaning any information about the molecular function,
biological process and cellular component of individual proteins
and then entering this information into our annotation tool
‘Protein2GO’.
I enjoy the annotation part of my job because I get to read
about all aspects of biology. As I have a plant background,
I was unaware how many dreadful diseases can afflict people.
So it makes me feel better that with every protein I annotate
I am hopefully making it easier for the scientific community
to understand what these proteins do at the molecular level.
This can help researchers to focus their research on ways
to combat these diseases.
At 12noon, I went to lunch
with my husband who works for the Wellcome Trust Advanced
Course Programme in the building next door, which certainly
makes it easier for commuting! After lunch, we took a walk
around the Wellcome Trust Wetlands Nature Reserve, which is
on-site, a nice peaceful way to round off lunchtime before
going back to work.
However, when I got back from lunch, there had been a power
cut and the whole building and part of the Sanger
Institute was without power. This makes doing our job difficult
as we rely heavily on computers. Fortunately, I had printed
out some papers I wanted to annotate. So I could sit in the
dim office writing down the annotations I would make to those
papers when we got power back.
Around 2pm, I decided to make a
start on a poster I am making for the European Society of
Human Genetics Conference I am attending
in Amsterdam this May. Obviously, I couldn’t
make it on the computer, so I just roughed it out on a piece
of paper. It shows what work we do here at GOA, how we make
our annotations, and some annotation statistics. I want to
include a plea to research scientists to submit any bulk data
they may have to our database, making our jobs a little easier.
Having done as much as I could do without power – it was not
due to come on for another 3-4 hours – I left work at 4pm,
an extra hour to play with my daughter!
Having a Ph.D. has really given me lots of opportunities
I would not otherwise have had. You just have to remember
to take advantage of them.
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