Daniel – Graduate Research Assistant (Genotyping)

What is your role at MRC Harwell?

I’m a Graduate Research Assistant in Genotyping, where we use a range of different techniques, like qPCR, PCR, allelic discriminations. We do some pyrosequencing. All to work out which mice carry the specific gene mutation we’re interested in, basically.

What is your background? Did you see yourself doing this kind of job when you were younger?

When I was younger, when I was much younger, in primary school, I actually wanted to be a historian or like an archaeologist at first. Then I went to secondary school and started picking up science and I started doing evolution in biology and that made me quite interested in things like genetics and biology and stuff like that. And then yeah, fell in love with science from there to be honest.

I did my undergraduate at Caledonian University in Glasgow in Pharmacology. I was interested in pharmacogenetics and that got me more interested in genetics, so I ended up doing a Master’s in Research and my Master’s in Research was heavily focused on things like CRISPR and gene editing and I tried to knock out a specific gene called METTL3 to look at the effects, basically, in cells. And absolutely just fell in love with CRISPR and lab work and all that sort of thing. Absolutely love it.

What have you enjoyed most about being on the Graduate Programme?

I’ve been lucky enough to attend a conference back in November/December for next gen -omics, which is all about genomics and proteomics and transcriptomics and stuff like that. And there’s actually quite a lot of bioinformatics there, which was quite confusing at first. It still is quite confusing, to be honest. And so I was very fortunate to do that. Absolutely loved that. And I’ve also sort of been doing a mini project on cancer lines here. I’ve been spending a lot of time working on that which I’ve absolutely loved doing. Because genotyping is quite funny. It gets a lot more complex as more alleles are added to the mice, basically.

I think the most useful thing I’ve learned is probably working in a professional lab setting where there’s a lot of regulations and a lot of tracking of everything that’s used. That’s very useful to learn all of that.

And then obviously the techniques as well, like qPCR, allelic discrimination and some of the more niche ones which I’ve enjoyed quite a lot learning about such as pyro-sequencing, which we do a lot with mitochondrial genotyping.

What do you want to do next?

I’m fairly confident I want to do a PhD. I want to do it in something similar to what I do now, so some sort of genetics or gene editing or gene engineering, something along those sort of lines is what I’d like to do. Before I came on to this, I was just unsure of what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do some sort of PhD but I didn’t really know where. I just knew I enjoyed genetics. I think now quite solidly I definitely want to do something semi related to what’s carried out here as it’s just really interesting.

Daniel joined the MLC through our Graduate Development Programme. You can find out more about the programme as well as interviews with our other graduates on our Graduate Development Programme page.