What can a funded summer internship result in? For Newnham undergraduate Georgia Yiasoumi, her first conference paper, and for Dr Tim Hearn, support to carry out some crucial preliminary research.
Newnham Senior Members Research Support gave Tim Hearn a grant from the Bathurst Fund, to pay a Newnham summer student for four weeks during the long vacation.
Georgia Yiasoumi, who spent the four weeks split between Cambridge and UCL, summarises her research findings, which have contributed to a conference paper. Georgia’s project focused on the functional effect of variation in the gene UBR4 in humans and zebrafish.
“The funds that I received from the SMRS grant from Newnham covered the costs of my accommodation and lab costs, allowing me to take part in a 4 week internship.
I used bioinformatic tools to interrogate the role of the gene UBR4 in causing cardiovascular-disease phenotypes, after identifying it as a target due to its homology to the plant gene BIG. Using many different websites and software, including the 100,000 genome project, to do this I was able to identify mutations in the gene that are candidates for causing arrhythmic cardiovascular disease.
The SMRS grant funded travel to and from UCL which allowed me to use a variety of new techniques. For example, testing for circadian entrainment phenotypes in zebrafish embryos, microinjecting and gene editing embryos with CRISPR-cas9 and using qPCR to look at gene expression. These techniques allowed me to investigate whether a section of the gene we were investigating had a functional role in controlling the circadian clocks of zebrafish.
The work that I preformed has been accepted to be presented at the Genomics England Research Conference 2019, 4th November 2019. London, UK, entitled ‘The rhythms of life: Identifying a role for the circadian regulator UBR4 in cardiac arrhythmia’ , Hearn, T and Yiasoumi, G (2019).”
Tim Hearn explained, “This grant allowed the successful testing of ideas that have formed the basis of upcoming grant proposals. This opportunity is really valuable for early career researchers who would otherwise lack the funds to generate preliminary data.” Tim is Director of Studies in Biological Natural Sciences at Newnham, and a researcher in the Department of Plant Sciences.