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One of the things I’m really interested are chaperones. They are a special class of proteins that help other proteins fold properly. A protein starts off just as a string of amino acids, and that string needs to fold into a 3D structure for the protein to work. Sometimes, that folding goes wrong. For example, when cells are heated up, proteins have a tendency to lose their shape. Chaperones can help these proteins recover their shape after this heat treatment.

Sometimes that chaperone assistance has an unexpected side effect: when mutations happen that destabilize the structure of the chaperone client, they are effectively invisible because the chaperone can bail its client out. In some odd bacteria, almost all proteins have really crappy structures but the cell is stuffed full of chaperones that hold things together. Like a broomstick that’s broken in several places – you can still use it when you wrap enough duct tape around it.

So one of the things I do is compare genomes with each other to see what effect chaperones have on how stable all the other proteins are.

I just started my own lab so recently I have been doing lots of things I had never done before: write job adverts to hire people, fill in health and safety forms (urgh…), or discuss with my colleagues how we’re gonna organize the lab.

But normally I start my day catching up with the latest bits of research in my field, and then spend most of the day analyzing data, writing emails to collaborators to coordinate the research we do together, or working on a manuscript I want to publish in the scientific literature.

It’s fair to say that I sit in front of the computer a lot – but what I do is actually quite varied rather than the same repetitive task over and over again.

Having just started my lab, I figured this would be a great way to get my new students involved in communicating our research to the public but also to work on something together, brainstorm, develop a project, and eventually carry it out. They should be able to decide themselves how best to use the money, so I don’t know yet what the concrete project is going to be.