I'm here at the Department of Zoology
with Research Fellow Rahia Mashoodh.
Would you like to tell us more about what you do as a research fellow?
Right now what I'm doing is that I'm collaborating
with Becky Kilner in Zoology
who has been, through several years,
studying these things called burying beetles.
Burying beetles are like a very weird, grotesque
and kind of cool insect in that they're highly social,
they're highly parental - they show this very rich social life.
In the wild what they do is that they pair up, they find a carcass,
usually a dead mouse or a small bird,
in which they then can lay eggs.
While those eggs are developing,
they prepare this carcass to become essentially an edible nest.
So they rip out all of the fur,
they take the guts out of the mouse, smear that all over
they release a bunch of antibiotics and exudates -
I know it sounds like...
- It's kind of gross.
But, also kind of cool.
Once the larvae hatch they essentially come to the carcass,
they feed off the carcass and the parents care and feed until they are developed.
So do you have some examples that you can show us?
Yes, I do. I just so happen to have a beetle here.
So here is an adult beetle...
that is on it's back.
What is it doing in that box as an adult?
This is an adult beetle who has just been fed today
and is going to be bred on Monday.
This particular beetle has received full levels of care across about 30 generations
and we also have another set of beetles that have been receiving,
or we've experimentally removed care for several generations,
and looked at their development as well.
So what do they look like when they're babies?
Well, here you go.
So here you can see a carcass that has been prepared by the parents.
The parents are hiding somewhere I'm sure, due to stage fright.
And there you have some larvae that are feeding on this carcass.
Ok, and what's the next stage after that?
So after they've all consumed the carcass, they basically go into a period of hibernation
where they dig themselves into the ground
and then emerge a couple of week's later as fully grown beetles, like that.
Ok, so how long does the entire process take?
It takes about three weeks from sort of egg-laying, for it to be an egg,
to being a fully adult beetle.
And then it takes about another two weeks until it's sexually mature
and we can breed them again.
So all in all it, it takes about...
eight weeks to get two generations.
Have you noticed between say,
the beetles that receive the normal parental care that they would usually have
and the beetles that are in the batch where they have the parents removed earlier...
over the period of your research have you
found any particular difference?
No.
Well no in the sense that the DNA stuff is what I'm just starting.
What my collaborators have shown is that, when you can rear these animals under regimes
of care and no care
and over the course of 30 generations...
I mean not having care is like
quite a stressful, severe experience
and they don't do very well,
but over time they start to adapt to these conditions.
What my collaborators have shown is that you get
an increase in cooperative behaviors by the larvae.
They're helping each other when there are no parents to feed off this carcass.
They also show a change in their morphology
where they're developing these larger mandibles
that we think help them eat the carcass better,
or get into the carcass better.
We also see that parents are adapting their behavior such that they're doing a lot
of front-end care because
it's almost as if they know
that they're not going to be there post hatching,
so they are doing a lot of pre-hatching care.
The thing is we have all of these instances in humans where
we see that changes in diets and changes in care regimes
are having these long term consequences in a single generation
and to a certain degree we also know
that they can have generations up - it's sort of like an effect for up
to the sort of grand offspring generation.
But what we really don't know is what's the mechanism.
So what this allows us to do is to look at these
mechanisms in a species that we can rapidly detect changes across time.
So I believe that you have lab, aside from this one,
that there's another lab that you use.
So would you be able to show us around that one?
So this is my wet lab space.
This is where, once I've taken all my beetle samples,
I can come in and start to extract DNA and RNA.
So DNA is Deoxyribonucleic acid, the basic element of ourselves,
and RNA is the products of our genes, so Ribonucleic acid.
What do you do with some of the things that you have out here?
What I can do is I can take,
say that I'm interested in measuring gene expression
amongst my no care and full care larvae,
what I can do is I can extract their DNA
and I can start to process them.
So this is where we add a lot of enzymes
and add a lot of tags
that then allow them to be sequenced.
So we can basically tag every single molecule of RNA
or gene that's expressed between these two beetles
and sequence them and tell where those differences are coming from.
Can you explain...and I understand that this might be a difficult question to explain simply...
but what is gene expression?
What do you mean by that?
In ourselves we normally have DNA,
and so everyone knows about the genes we've inherited.
But really the product of our DNA, or the things that make up ourselves and our phenotype,
are the products of genes.
So genes need to be basically transcribed into RNA,
which then becomes protein
and this is what ends up making up ourselves, our organs and our phenotype.
What we're really interested in is how genes become differentially expressed
in response to different environments.
So this is why we're interested in sequencing RNA across different types of beetles.
How often are you making these samples?
Well it depends, so I spend about a third of my time preparing the samples for sequencing.
The rest of my time, the other third,
I'm spending taking care of beetles, maintaining beetles, measuring things in beetles,
and then the last third I'm analyzing the
vast amounts of data we get back from sequencing,
and writing papers and grants and stuff.
So when you see that this is a third of your time...does it come in a particular sequence?
For example, you're doing this every three weeks or every month or every three months?
Usually what happens is, because these beetles are very long-term experiments,
this kind of work comes in spurts.
For example, I've spent the last couple months preparing these samples,
but probably as soon as they go for sequencing I won't do it for a few months.
Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us
and to show us around and good luck for the future!
Next, what we were going to be doing, is we will go to the Sainsbury Laboratory
where we'll meet Annalisa Rizza who works in plant science research.
She looks at how hormones affect plant growth.
Welcome to the Sainsbury laboratory.
I am here with Annalisa Rizza who is a Research Fellow.
Would you be able to tell us about what is it that you do here?
So I am interested in understanding how a photo-hormone called Gibberellin (GA)
is regulated in space and time in Arabidopsis thaliana.
Arabidopsis thaliana is a very small plant
so that's why it's important to have in the laboratory.
It also has a fast life cycle so you don't have to wait too long for having the results.
It has a small genome and inside the plants this is very important,
and all the genome is sequenced.
So how long is it's life cycle?
It's about two months, let's say from seed to seed.
When we harvest the seeds and then wait for the next generation, it's about two months.
You mentioned the hormone Gibberellin... what does it do in plants?
Gibberellin is one very important hormone because it plays a key role
during different developmental stages in plants,
starting from the seed germination till flowering.
So, for example, Gibberellin is important for letting the seed germinate.
If you remove Gibberellin from the plant,
you will never have happen the germination.
And if you give Gibberellin to plants during the maturation of the fruit,
you are going to see that and the fruit is bigger
because Gibberellin promotes the fruit maturation.
But it also promotes the transition to flowering,
so if you remove the Gibberellin,
the plant is kind of delayed in flowering
and also is quite small because Gibberrellin is also promoting the elongation, the cell elongation.
So if you consider that the tissue is composed by different cells,
and you remove the Gibberellin, all the tissues are shorter.
This is your lab space... so what is it that you use this for?
I do the experiments here.
All my curiosity, all my investigations, occur in this small space.
Here you can see there are several bottles
because there are several solutions for different purposes.
I can use a solution like this is, for example.
It contains a gel, as you can see.
When you want to put some seeds of Arabidopsis thaliana,
and allow the germination and to grow in order to have a young seedlings.
So it's to reproduce the soil but just in a normal plate.
Can you explain, because you have lots of Post-it notes here -
Yeah these are my small notes so I can go faster in the preparation.
This is just the amount of different Post-its that I usually use for my work,
or preparation of particular media or solution for some experiment.
This is called staining - it's called GUS staining.
Yeah it's kind of messy, but it's the way to...
If you do sometimes the same experiments, you need the same material.
So it's easier to just look in front of you and understand the amount that you need
for one litre, three litres, or 200ml and all these things.
So how much time do you spend generally - say, for example, in a week -
how much time might you spend in this area?
Everything is really depending on the period.
So there are periods where you are more busy in the experiment,
periods when you are doing something else.
But, let's say that eighty percent is here.
Where is the other twenty percent?
The twenty percent is mainly supervising the students, writing,
reading because you always have to follow the publications.
The new discoveries are coming so you always have to be up to date about that.
So writing, publication and mentoring.
As you say, this is only just one of the spaces that you use in your work.
So can you show us some of the other spaces that you use as well?
Sure, let's go.
So we need now to go to the Confocal,
the Confocal Microscopy.
Usually that room is quite cold and dark
because you have a laser as the source of the light
that is going inside the sample to detect my protein.
It is important to be in darkness because
it will affect the imaging and also the temperature.
The temperature affects the function... the functionality of the laser,
but also in my case, for the plants, it affects amount of GA.
So it's important to keep constant the temperature.
We should go downstairs .
During the Confocal Microscopy
I'm going to show how to prepare a sample
and then how we do a fast imaging.
So we will go through the Z direction,
the focusing inside the sample, in order to have the different layers of the tissue,
and you are going to see my protein in the sample.
I think it's quite nice.
I mean, I remember the first time that I did it
I was like 'oh cool!'
Very kindly, they already opened it.
So this is my second office, as people here call it, because I do a lot of imaging.
...I can turn on the light now.
So I allocated the slide here and now I need to focus the sample
to understand where is the sample.
I can move the slide in the three directions.
I can move in the X, in the Y and I can also move in the Z.
You can see that the stage is going up in that case
because I need to focus on the root here,
give it some light and then go in very close.
Now I can look here and allocate better
There it is...
So I can just give you like the live
This is Arabidopsis root,
and the dots that you see, these are nuclei expressing my protein.
You can see...you know your eyes are going just to see the image
in two dimensions - in the Y and in the X.
But, with this machine and with these tools, we can add a third measure that is the Z's.
So getting the projection inside and outside the sample.
You can see that more go down and more go up...
I'm focusing on different nuclei
because I am going inside the tissue
and different layers of tissue cannot be at the same focusing
because they are in different layers and different depths.
So then when I'm ready, I turn off the light and then we can image again.
Alright!
So in the beginning it can be quite dim, the signal.
Because I need to take all the information inside the Arabidopsis root,
the more nuclei I try to include inside the image,
the more precise can be my analysis.
So now we go to the place where usually I analyse the data.
Once you image on the Microscopy, that's very good, very interesting, has to be nice image.
But only the image is like half of your work,
because then you have to interpret your working and your image,
the meaning of that image.
So there is a second part that is in the office where, in my case,
measure the amount of GA in the roots that I just imaged.
So this is my third office.
This is where I spend a lot of time because I am analysing all of the data
that I acquired downstairs at the Confocal.
As I was saying, when you image, you need then to analyse that image.
Once you have a beautiful image that's just half of your work because
then you need to understand like what's an interpretation of that image.
In my case, that is like the measure of GA in the amount of the cells.
So this is the root and,
as I was saying before, these dots are the nuclei
expressing my protein.
So now I'm going to process this image and try to identify these nuclei
as an object and color that object
based on the amount of the GA that is inside.
Okay, now I finish and I can color the surfaces
based on the ratio of intensity that I've done.
Now you can see clearly that I have differences in color
Yes.
So I have purple, I have blue, I have green,
I have light green, I have a yellowish here .
The different color is here this part.
When I have blue, it means that I have a low emission ratio
and when I have red, I have high emission ratio.
Now in terms of GA, what that means is that,
if it's purple, I have low GA level.
If I have red, means very high.
Okay, so this this would seem therefore that
this sample doesn't have much GA down the bottom...
it has much more here at the top.
Which is...when looking at it originally,
you would have thought that there was more on the bottom
because you saw...because there was more yellow in it -
- because there were more nuclei.
- Yeah
In fact it's completely different.
So that's why it's important to process.
Now if we if we go in terms of biology,
it's right to see that here has more GA
because these kinds of cells are called elongation zone.
It means that the cells are more elongated compared to this part.
In order to be elongated, they need the GA.
It seems that you know that you want to stay in research
but you're obviously unsure as to necessarily what that next step,
or when the next step will be.
Is it likely that you'll stay with this sort of hormonal aspect of it?
Or is there a complete other branch of plant science
that you would be interested in...?
It's really depending again ...
because so far I am really keen on understanding how this hormone works.
I want to follow it and I want to finish
and I want to reach like a story...finish the story
to pass it to my supervisor and say
'Okay, the story is over.'
But when you study Gibberellin and other hormones,
it's very difficult to finish the story because,
as I was saying,
in the beginning we always cross talk between hormones
so I might think that to stay with this hormone but follow another part,
or another branch in the pathway,
that so far I didn't analyse because lack of time...
I mean, unfortunately the nature is much bigger than our brain.
So we need a lot of time to discover the things.
Well thank you very much for
coming to talk to us and to show us all around the different spaces that you use
and explain the kind of research that you're doing.
We wish you luck for your future!
We hope you this second episode of Inside Cambridge.
If you would like to provide any suggestions about what you would like to see in the future,
if you have any comments then please just add those below.
And if you would like to see more content
from the University of Cambridge,
then please like and subscribe.
We hope to see you again soon!
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