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You’ve all been told in your sex education lessons about what happens when a sperm meets an egg – a baby is born 9 months later! Well a lot happens in those 9 months! And actually I’m only focusing on what happens right at the beginning. At this stage the embryo is only a bunch of cells and the cells divide to make more cells, and they have to decide what kind of cell to become. One cell might decide they will go on to make the brain, while another might go on to make blood. How does the cell know what it should become? How is this controlled so this development happens correctly? I am trying to answer this question by looking at one molecule called “Sall4”. When we get rid of Sall4 in the mouse embryo, the embryos don’t survive past the very early stages of development. So why is this, what is Sall4 doing in the cells that means it is so important? This work I am doing will hopefully lead to us to understand better how cells make these decisions, and this could mean we can control these decisions, and so make cells that ill people might need – for example to make working liver cells for people with liver diseases.

Most experiments take more than one day to finish, some can take ageesssss (especially if things go wrong :S ). So a typical day for me means I do little bits of each experiment I’m running (I definitely need to write everything I do down or I completely forget where I get to in each experiment – especially when I’m doing more than 3 things at the same time!)

But the thing that always stays the same is looking after my cells. Everything I do at the moment is using these stem cells (these are mouse embryonic stem cells – so we take them from a mouse embryo four days after fertilisation. At this stage its only a ball of cells. And we can keep these cells growing forever in culture so we only need 1 embryo to get cells to work with forever in the lab!)

And I’ll probably talk about some science with other scientists, or just chat!