Profile
Leila Abbas
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The lab I work in is looking at ways of using human embryonic stem cells to help make new treatments for hearing loss.
Your whole body is made from cells, which spring into action when you hurt yourself, or need new blood cells or anything like that. The stem cells that live in those tissues can start to multiply to fix the damage, but the problem is that they can only repair their own type, so your blood stem cells can’t repair your brain. However, what’s different and special about embryonic stem cells is that they not only can they keep dividing (seemingly) forever when we grow them in the lab, but that they can become ANY other cell type if you give them the right instructions!
We’re looking at how to make new ‘ear’ cells from stem cells – we think we’ve found the instructions that they need to specialise into the cells that capture the sounds of the outside world and transport them as electrical signals from your ear into your brain. This is where the gerbils come in – by taking a gerbil that has a hearing loss, I can transplant these stem cells into its ear and show that it gets its hearing back. Pretty cool, eh?!
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My Typical Day:
Every day is different! That’s why science is so much fun.
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The first thing I do is fire up my laptop and see what’s in my diary for the day, so that I can plan experiments around any meetings or lectures that we have. I’ll also check my email and have a quick look at the news, to see if there’s any exciting science breakthroughs. Then I’ll go and check on the gerbils to check that everyone’s okay, and I’ll do some hearing tests with them while I’m there. I’ll spend a couple of hours analysing data and results from experiments, to see where we want to go next with a project. I also usually have some embryonic stem cells living in culture in an incubator, so I’ll feed them and put them into fresh flasks if they’re looking a bit crowded.
After lunch, I might go and look at some microscope slides of tissue samples – we’re lucky enough to have some very fancy laser-powered microscopes, so we can get some really beautiful pictures of our work. I’ll then spend time putting these pictures together to illustrate our experiments for research papers – kind of like writing a really long and specialised essay, so that other scientists can see what you’ve been up to.
I’ll go and check the gerbils again and give them some treats before bed and then it’s time to go home for me too.