Author: kristinafidanovski

Genetics and Jazz: The Two Sides to Emily Vohralik

By Kristina Fidanovski

Emily Vohralik

Emily, like many scientists, leads a double life. She doesn’t begin with that though. When she sits down for this interview, she has an easy smile and ready words to set me at ease (I’ve never interviewed anyone before), and at first she tells me about molecular genetics and cell biology. The Jazzercise comes later.

By day, Emily works on getting her PhD. Where that will take her, she’s not too sure yet. But for now, she looks at how genes can affect your metabolism through your immune system. Specifically, she’s looking at the genes inside a type of immune cell – the eosinophil – which lives inside fat and . There’s been a lot of hype around beige and brown fat recently, mostly because it’s a type of fat that burns energy. Some people have it, some people don’t. And that’s pretty exciting to think about in terms of how these cells could be activated and used as an obesity treatment. Emily says that the hype isn’t necessarily wrong or misinformed, it’s just early: we’re not there yet. Her work is on the fundamental end, she’s working on establishing the basic facts about eosinophils, their genes and how they interact with fat cells.

An Average Day in the Life of Emily: Molecular Geneticist
The Dreaded Commute Check emails and get the day started.
Morning Lab Time! Working with bacteria to grow some DNA and then extract it.

Outreach Activity: A fun 20 minutes of pretending not to be cold for a Women in STEAM photoshoot (a collaboration between women in science and art to capture the image of all types of scientists for a photo exhibit).
Lunch Important networking time… that is, lunch with a couple of the lab buddies.
Afternoon More lab time, this time to prepare the DNA for sequencing and send it off.

Some computer time analysing data, catching up on the latest in the field, or putting off working on those presentation slides you really need to do.
Evening Freedom: for musical and athletic pursuits!
Emily in the tissue culture hood preparing to feed her cells.

But how did Emily come to be labouring away on a PhD anyway? She says that in high school she was just picking all the subjects she enjoyed. And those subjects happened to be chemistry, physics and biology (with some maths and English thrown in), even though her teachers were saying “Isn’t that too much science?” Emily didn’t think so. At university she did some general science and got really interested in molecular cell biology. She got more and more engrossed as each year passed until her third year conversations with PhD students hooked her into doing an honours project. It was in the same group she’s currently working in. When her honours year was coming to a close she says, “I felt like I had only just scratched the surface of my project.” So it felt natural to her to keep going and really dig into the fascinating world of ‘immunometabolism’.

Emily showing an experiment to an honours student, Annalise: labelling eosinophils with fluorescent tags and then analysing them with flow cytometry.

It seems to be going well for her. She’s a recipient of the prestigious Scientia Scholarship, though she’s too modest to mention it. And she already has an international conference under her belt. Last year she presented a poster at an ‘Immunometabolism’ conference in Aspen, Colorado. She says it was really cool to finally meet the people whose names you see on papers. She also likes how easy it is to share ideas when you’ve all been brought together like that. This year she’ll be travelling again for an ‘Eosinophil’ conference in Portland, Oregon. She’s looking forward to it, not just because the travel part is fun, but also because she feels that meeting other researchers expands your thinking in ways that no other experience can.

Finally, I get around to asking her who she is when the lab coat comes off. The answer is “Jazzercise! The original dance fitness.” I learn that it was started 50 years ago and involves dancing to songs for exercise, with strength training at the end to make sure you really feel it in the morning. Emily likes exploring that totally different side of herself and she’s even been an instructor since last July. It’s certainly an unexpected and totally brilliant answer. I’m fascinated. It’s almost an afterthought when I also learn that she plays clarinet in the Kuringai Youth Orchestra. She is a hidden wealth of talents.

In the end I ask her about the UNSW Women in Maths and Science Champions Program. “It was always something that I wanted to try,” she says – interacting, connecting with young girls who might one day come to love science. She thinks that it’s sad a lot of young girls might not even consider science. “We’ve all been there, if we can be inspiring to them that’s pretty cool.” She feels that being a scientist is about more than just the science that happens in the lab, “We have to be communicators too.”

Follow Emily on twitter @EVohralik

Follow Kristina on twitter @Kris_Fidanovski

Conjugated Polymers – Plastics with Funky Properties

By Kristina Fidanovski

If you don’t know what a polymer is, let alone a conjugated polymer, don’t panic. I guarantee you’ll get it by the end of this article. You use polymers every day – they’re things like plastics and resins, DNA and proteins. To get into the nitty-gritty: they’re one huge molecule made up of lots and lots of repeating units called monomers. They’re also probably not the first thing you think of when you’re looking for a material that conducts electricity. But conjugated polymers can be conductive, and they’re an interesting and really important type of material. Here’s why: imagine a circuit board as durable and flexible as the plastics you encounter every day. A conductive material like that could find its way into flexible displays, fabric-like solar cells, and even the human body for imaging and therapy.

*Spoiler Alert*: They already have.

As interesting as flexible solar cells are (no really, go check them out, they’re super cool), the biological applications are mindboggling, and so those are the ones you’re going to read about here. I might be a bit biased, so bear with me…

The research on conjugated polymers in biological applications is just getting started, but here are a few examples of the latest research:

1. An artificial retina that restored sight to blind rats.1

This artificial retina is useful for cases where the blindness is due to a degenerative disease, like retinitis pigmentosa, where the photoreceptors die but the rest of the vision apparatus is still functional. In other words, the cells that have died are the ones responsible for converting light into an electrical signal, which can then be transmitted to the brain by the nerves. These cells can be replaced with a polymer device (since conjugated polymers are often very good at absorbing light and converting it into an electrical signal).

The rats that got this implant were more sensitive to light and the activity in the area of the brain responsible for processing vision – the visual cortex – was practically the same as in seeing rats.

Figure 1 A diagram of the implant and where it went in the eye.1 Since the photoreceptor cells were degenerate, they replaced it with a conjugated polymer device which works a lot like a solar cell. RPE, retinal pigment epithelium; ONL, outer nuclear layer; INL, inner nuclear layer; GCL, ganglion cell layer.

2. Recording local neuron activity in an actual human brain.2

The NeuroGrid (visible on a flower in a and on a rat brain in b) is made up of gold pads which are covered and interconnected with a conjugated polymer. It produced really low noise recordings of small, localised areas of brain activity which could provide a lot of information to researchers about what individual brain cell connections are up to, particularly in people with epilepsy. Two people having surgery for epilepsy had it tested on them, so this soft, flexible electrode system has actually been stuck on a human brain!

Figure 2 Picture of the flexible NeuroGrid as it bends to accommodate a) a flower petal and b) a rat brain.2

3. Light-up polymer skins.3

These thin, flexible, polymer skins can be attached to humans in the form of, for example, a pulse oximeter: a device to measure the oxygen concentration of blood like in Figure 3b. You could then display that data from the pulse oximeter directly on the body in a similar way to Figure 3d. Figure 3c shows some of the awesome versatility of the system by displaying their university logo in different colours… on someone’s face!

Figure 3 A) Illustration of the polymer skins. Photographs of B) a finger with the pulse oximeter (blood oxygen) sensor attached, C) a human face with a blue logo of the University of Tokyo and two-coloured logos, and D) a red numeric display on a hand.3
  1. Maya-vetencourt, J. F. et al. A fully organic retinal prosthesis restores vision in a rat model of degenerative blindness. 16, 681–689 (2017).
  2. Khodagholy, D. et al. NeuroGrid: Recording action potentials from the surface of the brain. Nat. Neurosci. 18, 310–315 (2015).
  3. Yokota, T. et al. Ultraflexible organic photonic skin. Sci. Adv. 2, e1501856 (2016).

Follow Kristina on Twitter (@Kris_Fidanovski)