Profile

I moved from warm Spain to cold Scotland a while ago. I can speak a language which origin is still unknown, Basque. I have always been in love with science. I love dancing, done ballet since I was six. I love cycling, skiing and I’m a nature passionate. I have a lovely boyfriend who I share my live with.

As human cells, bacteria also have DNA inside them. This DNA can be copy-pasted, cut or manipulated. This requires a lot of precision as bacteria are veeeeery small, like 100 times smaller than a hair, so… imagine their DNA!

I let them grow in the conditions they need. I feed them, have them warm…and at some point they will have multiplied enough to work with them.

At that point, I take them all together, and make them explode as the DNA is inside them and that’s what we are interested about. When I have their DNA with me, I use some techniques to modify how it is and later, I see if this changes affected their function.

When I change their DNA, I grow them again and feed them with different stuff to see if they are able to produce the material that is used to produce the windscreen of cars. The material that makes them be transparent, hard and safe to be able to drive.

This work may seem simple, but it will take 4 years, so imagine how hard it is!

We are around 8 people working in the same department so we share working space, machines and knowledge every day.

The machines we work with centrifuge the bugs, make them explode, shake them… It really seems stressful for them, but this is the procedure we need to follow. We have a “clean bench” which means that no bacteria are present in that surface, so that we don’t contaminate our samples.

It depends on the week, but I normally grow bacteria on a Monday, explode them on a Tuesday, analyse them on a Wednesday and the rest of the days are about analyzing data and putting everything on a nice way to show it to my boss. We have studied a lot, and we still are, about how to perform the best strategies with the bugs, so we developed bullet point lists to double check what we are doing is right or not.

As said before, we don’t want to contaminate our samples or ourselves, so we wear gloves, googles and lab coat every single minute we are in the lab.