After my
first month as a PhD was so exciting and jam packed with things to do, I hoped
this week would slow down, so that I had the time to sort out all those little
things that get pushed aside when you have big projects to work on. Some of the
topics in this week’s post may get a little scientific, so I will make the words
or phrase in bold and leave some links at the bottom of the post for any of you
that are interested in reading more.
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| Spangled Darter (Etheostoma obama) named after Barack Obama. A common tread of the Darter fish, is they are named after a USA presidents. |
The week
started with the usual meetings with the unit and lab team, I found out that I
was accepted onto the genomics workshop in Český Krumlov, Czech Republic and was followed by my very first session of
Journal club. Journal club is a very interesting concept, were people present
interesting journals that could be very different from their own topic, but
still relevant to our departments field. It is something I will definitely take
part in when I find a paper I enjoy enough to take the time to present. This
week Alexander Jüterbock gave a very good presentation on an extremely
interesting, but a not so statistically significant paper. The paper was called
“Epigenetic divergence as a potential
first step in darter speciation” (Also linked at the bottom of this post).
Epigenetics, for those of you that don’t know it is the
study of genetic effects that are not caused by DNA itself and may be a result
of environmental factors, that switch genes on and off and change how a cell works.
If it is still a little confusing let me give you a quick example, every cell
in your body has all the DNA within them that makes you, you. Your skin cell is
a skin cell and not a white blood cell for example, because only certain genes
are being expressed. In this paper it focused on a particular type of
epigenetics known as “DNA methylation”,
which is when methyl groups (a chemical compound) are added to DNA, which in turn
modifies how it functions. The papers results, simply put, tried to show that epigenetic
changes such as DNA methylation, could influence or be the first step in
speciation (evolution).
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| The excited little scientist! |
As I mentioned
previously the paper was extremely interesting, but the paper seemed to be
lacking in significant statistical evidence. I could write an entire paper on
how modern science has become too focused on significant statistics that we are
blind to papers like this, but I won’t go into that here! However, one very
interesting thing this paper did for me, was that I started thinking about how
it could affect my own project and if I could look at this DNA methylation in
my own subject genus Fucus. After speaking to my supervisor, it turns out that we don’t even
know if Fucus use DNA methylation, something
we plan to find out about in the near future. This could open up a lot more
questions, which I would be very excited to answer!
Finally, at
the end of the work week I worked on fixing a computer with Linux, I finally
got around to apply to Research Gate,
ARCTOS and applying to be a SSB student representative, but I was
mainly working on my CV. This was something I didn’t think I would need to do
since I was offered the PhD, but I could not have been more wrong and have
already submitted it 4 times since I started in September!
Although
this week was not as exciting as my last, I hope you still enjoyed my post! Please
feel free to leave me feedback and comment and have a great week and I will see
you all in my next post!
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| Pictures from the grand finale of the Researchers Battle in Stormen last week. From top lefts, Me, Peter Schulze, Asan Mohideen and Helene Rønquist Knutsen. |
Article
Societies
ARCTOS - https://arctos.uit.no/home
SSB - http://www.systbio.org/
Interesting links
Český Krumlov - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cesk%C3%BD_Krumlov
Epigenetics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
DNA methylation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation
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