During my 9-month internship, I helped with tracing and analysing neurons that synapse in the accessory calyces of the fly brain’s learning centre – the mushroom body. Sensory inputs to the accessory calyces are rarely smell-related, which is uncommon for the mushroom body. Our main focus for instance – the lateral accessory calyx – receives temperature and humidity information.
I am doing my PhD at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) near Cambridge, where I am jointly a part of the Brazma and Uhlmann research groups. I have a Biology and Image Analysis background, although currently my PhD journey has led me to simulate images of variably shaped Nuclear Pore Complexes (NPCs). NPCs are massive protein complexes through which large molecules can travel in and out of the cell nucleus. I am hoping my research will help to test how image analysis software deals with hypothetical NPC variability. From this, we aim to learn more about actual NPC variability.
Drosophila connectomics is excitingly different from what I did before or after. I think it’s great to gain a broad range of experiences early in the scientific career. But more importantly, the group was phenomenally well-managed and friendly, and offered support at every step of my scientific journey.