Profile

Hi, I’m Chris! I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, but now I live in London with my boyfriend Stephen and our greyhound Beau.

Me, my boyfriend Stephen and our greyhound Beau

I’ve been working at University College London for about ten years, and in our team we try to understand how cells produce all the different kinds of protein molecules they need to survive and reproduce.

I love being a scientist, but I have lots of other hobbies too. I play the piano and french horn, and almost became a musician instead of a scientist! I played in lots of orchestras at university, which was great fun, but now I mostly play the piano. I try and do a bit of practise each day – I find the music often helps me unwind, and some of my best ideas have come when I’m not really thinking about them! I cycle to the lab each day, but I also enjoy going for long rides with friends – sometimes overnight, or even camping along the way. We’re really lucky to have a nice garden at home, so we spend a lot of time there, and like to grow lots of different kinds of vegetables to eat. Beau also loves running around in it – he’s super fast, as he used to be a racing dog until he retired and we adopted him!

I study how proteins get made inside cells, and how they carry out their functions, and sometimes what happens when they go wrong and lead to disease. When scientists like me talk about proteins, we’re not thinking about food like meat or eggs – we’re thinking about the individual molecules that carry out all the different functions a cell needs to survive and reproduce.

There are lots of different proteins, which all have different structures. Some of these structures look a bit like letters – you can go to a website here (https://www.nigms.nih.gov/education/activities-and-multimedia/Pages/Protein-Alphabet.aspx) and write your own name in protein letters!

Every cell in your body has DNA, which stores the instructions required to make about 20,000 different proteins – we call these instructions ‘genes’. The DNA is stored safely in the nucleus of the cell, so when a gene is needed the cell makes a copy of the instructions in a molecule called messenger RNA. These instructions are then delivered to factories called ribosomes which follow the instructions and join together amino acid building blocks to create a new protein molecule.

As a protein molecule is created, it needs to fold up into the right shape to carry out its function. Somehow, this 3D shape is encoded in the sequence of amino acids, and understanding how this happens has been keeping biologists, chemists and physicists busy since the 1950s!

Protein molecules are tiny – if you put 100,000 of them side by side they’d only be the width of a hair! This is much too small to see with a microscope, so in my work we use a technique called ‘nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy’, or NMR for short, to try and work out what protein molecules are doing. Like most molecules, proteins contain lots of hydrogen atoms. If you put these into a strong magnet then they each absorb very slightly different frequencies of radio waves (a bit like the different colours of light you can see in a rainbow). By analysing these measurements, we can build a picture of what all the different atoms in our proteins are doing – what the protein structure is, how it’s moving, and what it’s interacting with.

The ‘magnet room’ at the Francis Crick Institute, where we go to do some of our NMR measurements. The 950 magnet is one of the strongest in the world, and the wooden staircase had to be specially built with non-magnetic screws!

I think NMR is one of the most incredible techniques in the world! You can get so much information out of it, although sometimes it can be hard work to understand what the results actually mean. It’s also the exact same technology that’s used in MRI scanners in hospitals, although the magnets in our labs are much stronger! I love the variety that NMR involves – from quite complicated quantum mechanics to describe how an experiment works, computer programming to make an experiment run, and biology to understand the results of your experiment!

Our ‘wet lab’ at UCL, where we prepare our samples. We use genetic engineering to make cells produce the protein we want to study, and here Sammy is getting ready to grow some cells in the big flasks in front of him.

This is what one of our samples looks like, just before we begin some measurements using the NMR spectrometer in the background. Notice that we always hold the sample at the top – we don’t want dirt or grease from our fingers getting into the sensitive detector!

At work in the control room next to the magnet chamber. If you look carefully, the screen on the left shows the results of one measurement. The position of each blue spot in the spectrum helps to tell us what the individual amino acid building blocks in our protein is doing.

One of my favourite aspects of being a scientist is going to conferences to meet other scientists, share our latest discoveries, and make friends across the world. I’ve been able to travel to lots of interesting places, from ski resorts in America to summer in Japan!

There are lots of interesting – and fun – talks from scientists to listen to at conferences.

Conferences also have ‘poster sessions’ where scientists present their latest research and you can meet to discuss it. These are a great way to get the know the other people around the world who are interested in the same research as you!

I get up and take our dog Beau for a walk. Some days I’ll stay at home and work at the computer (especially at the moment), but other days I’ll get on my bike and ride for an hour into our lab in the middle of London to do experiments. Some exercise is a great way to start the day, and I’ll often start to think about some of the experiments and meetings I have along the way.

The Francis Crick Institute, a lab in the middle of London where I go to do some NMR measurements

The magnet room is four floors underground! This is partly because the magnets are so heavy, but because our measurements are so sensitive it’s also really important that there isn’t anything around to disturb them.

A lot of my day is spent with other students and scientists, and working on measurements together with them.

At work in the magnet room helping one of our students, Alistair, with his measurements

Once we’ve done the experiments it usually takes a while to analyse the results on the computer, and then we will write up what we’ve discovered into a paper to share with other scientists. You can see an example here of a paper we published recently!

At home working on a paper

I’ll try and take a break in the middle of the day and go for a swim – there’s a lovely outdoor pool near our lab – and then come back to work for a bit more.

Taking a break in the middle of the day to go for a swim helps clear my head and focus on the rest of the day

Often I have video calls with other scientists around the world that I’m working with, or I’ll spend some time reading about what other people have been discovering. Sometimes by the time I’ve done all this it’s late, but once I’ve cycled home again I try to do some piano practise then take Beau for a nice long walk before bed.

Beau likes to go for a walk along the river when I get home!