Winner of the public vote in the Images of Research competition 2013
Understanding melanoma through colourful fish
Department of Biology & Biochemistry, University of Bath
When the cells that give colour to our skin, called melanocytes, lose their normal stable behaviour and start to grow out of control invading nearby tissues they originate melanoma, one of the most aggressive kinds of cancer. This transformation from healthy to cancerous cell is caused by the aberrant activation of some genes that are only active in the normal melanocyte development in the embryonic stages of the organism. My research aims to understand how the genes regulating normal melanocyte development work in order to understand why their abnormal activation leads to melanoma. For that, I’m using the embryos from a fish called ‘zebrafish’. I stain them with different fluorescent substances to detect the genes involved in normal melanocyte development in order to understand why they work abnormally in melanoma. This will provide us with new targets for treatment.
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In the Images of Research competition, researchers from across the University of Bath have submitted eye-catching images and short narratives which illustrate the breadth of important research taking place at the University and the difference it is making to people’s lives.
My image also have the added feature of augmented reality, meaning that you can use your smart phone or tablet to scan the image and watch videos and other online material. To use it you should download the Aurasma app in your device. Once you’ve installed the app, open your browser in your device and visit http://go.bath.ac.uk/iraura13 to follow the Images of Research channel. Then you only have to scan the image to see the content!
You can have a look at the rest of the entries to the Images of Research 2013 competition here: http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/about/imagesofresearch/2013/index.html
If you are in the Bath area you can see the images and vote for your favourite in a public exhibition this weekend. The exhibition will be on display on Saturday & Sunday (1&2 June) in the Officers’ Club, Stall Street from 11 am until 6 pm as part of the Fringe Arts Bath Festival. So come along and vote for my image!
10 years without Dolly
Last week (Thursday 14th) was the 10th anniversary of the death of Dolly the sheep. Dolly hit the headlines of the media when she was born in 1996 because she was the first animal cloned from an adult cell. She was cloned by Sir Ian Wilmut, Dr Keith Campbell and collaborators at the Roslin Institute and the biotechnology company PPL Therapeutics in Edinburgh.
Dolly with her lamb Bonny from The Roslin Institute
Dolly was created using the process of nuclear transfer. The technique consists in taking a cell from the body of the sheep you want to clone and its nucleus, which carries all the genetic information to create an identical sheep, is extracted. Then from a different sheep we take an egg cell and we remove its nucleus. We introduce the nucleus extracted from the first sheep (the one we are cloning) into the nucleus-free egg cell and we apply a small electric shock to fuse them. A embryo starts to develop and we implant it inside the uterus of a surrogate sheep. After the end of the pregnancy a sheep genetically identical to the one from which we extracted the nucleus will born i.e. it will be its clone.
The Roslin Institute research was focussed on the development of techniques to produce transgenic farm animals and the cloning technology was an extension of it. They wanted to create genetically modified farm animals to improve some of its properties and to use them to produce useful substances such as production of human proteins in the milk of transgenic cattle or sheep. In order to create these transgenic animals they had to improve the technique to inject modified genes into the embryos nucleus, which was very inefficient. That’s why they started to pursue the nuclear transfer technique as a way to produce transgenic animals.
from Wikipedia
Although in 2001 Dolly was diagnosed with arthritis, she was fairly healthy until 2003 when she was diagnosed with sheep pulmonary adenomatosis, a incurable disease caused by a virus that leads to tumour growth in the animal’s lungs. Vets detected tumours in Dolly’s lungs and as they didn’t want Dolly to suffer, her life was ended.
Dolly demonstrated that it was possible to turn back a differentiated cell from an adult organism to the stage where it behaves like a fertilised egg, being able to produce several different cell types. She became worldwide famous and sparked a necessary and controversial debate in society around cloning and genetically modified organism that still perdures today.
References:
The Roslin Institute: http://www.roslin.ed.ac.uk/public-interest/dolly-the-sheep/
My research: Understanding melanocyte development
Complex organisms (such as mice, fish, flies or worms) are formed by millions of cells. But those cells are not all the same, they have divided into groups or families of cells and each group is specialised in doing a certain function in the organism. Therefore, we have similar cells that work together to produce the arteries that distribute the blood throughout the organism and those cells are very different from the ones that form the bones that give shape to the organism.
Hence, organisms are formed by lots of different cells which perform diverse functions and are located in different places in the organism. But all of this diversity originates from a single fertilised egg cell, formed by the fusion of two cells from each progenitor, which contains a single genome. So, how is it possible that with only one set of information (a single genome) the single fertilised egg cell develops so many different cells to create a complex organism? This is one of the main questions of Biology and there is a whole discipline dedicated to answer it: Developmental Biology.
The aim of my research is to get a better understanding of the differentiation of a single cell into several specialised cells and understand how the new cells created from the single cell embryo choose their fate, i.e. how a cell chooses to become a bone cell or a brain cell.
To understand this developmental process of fate choice and cell specification we use zebrafish as a model organism where we perform our experiments. These little fish are very useful in research because they are cheap to grow and easy to maintain, their embryos are transparent and the adult fish produce lots of embryos when they mate. They are a great tool to understand developmental biology processes. From all the different kinds of cells that form a zebrafish my research is focused on understanding melanocytes development in the early stages of embryo development, after the egg cell has been fertilised by the sperm; i.e. how after the single cell embryo has divided itself and it has created several cells, some of them choose to become melanocytes and what changes they experience to become a fully differentiated melanocyte or an “adult” melanocyte, if you like.
The image shows the early developmental stages of a zebrafish embryo. On the left we can see the single cell embryo just after fertilisation and on the right we can see the embryo 24 hours after the fertilisation. As you can see, in just 24 hours there have been huge changes and you can start to identify a fish shape in the embryo. Image adapted from Kimmel et al. 1995.
Melanocytes are pigment cells that have a brownish colour and give the colour to our skin. These cells are a great model to understand development because they are big and black, which makes them easy to see and follow in the transparent fish embryos as they develop. Also, melanocytes are the cells that cause melanoma when something wrong happens in its genes. Melanoma is one of the most aggressive types of cancer and it has difficult treatment. Therefore, understanding how melanocytes are created and how they work is very important to figure out how development happens and also to understand what makes a melanocyte lose its control and become a cancer cell.
Sciplexity 