Profile

Hello, my name is Hannah.

I live in Harpenden with four housemates, and I am just now realising that I am the only PhD student in the house! If I could have pets where I live I would love to have a dog🐶.

I have a degree in Biology and now I’m working at Rothamsted Research and the University of Nottingham to get my PhD in Plant Pathology.

When I’m not working I like to spend time with my friends or on my hobbies! I recently started practising watercolour painting🖌️ and gymnastics, my cartwheels are getting good🤸‍♀️! But I also love stargazing🌠, climbing🧗‍♀️, baking🧁, photography📸 and I spend too much time listening to podcasts or watching YouTube/Twitch or playing video games🎮.

My pronouns are she/her.

I work with a microbe known as Zymoseptoria tritici, but I like to call it Zymo for short. Zymo is a fungus that causes disease only on wheat leaves and results in the loss of up to 50% yield. Farmers definitely do not stan this fungus.

Zymoseptoria UV mutants on a wheat leaf.

It has been roughly calculated that efforts to control this disease accounts for 70% of the EU’S pesticide use (specifically fungicides – chemicals that kill fungi!).

In a similar way to how bacteria become resistant to many antibiotics, fungi like Zymo are capable of becoming resistant to many pesticides. Zymo has been shown to have some resistance to all the pesticides we have to throw at it!

This is why my project is important: if we can understand what genetics controls the ability to cause disease we can develop new ways or new chemistries to help control the fungus!

To do this I change Zymo’s DNA randomly. After testing my mutants on wheat plants and on different types of agar plates, I extract their DNA and send the “interesting” ones to have their whole genomes sequenced so I can find out what genes changed. Once I have worked out which changes I think are most likely to explain the “interesting” mutants, I then have to confirm this by making (you guessed it…) more mutants. I consider myself a bit of a mutant detective, searching for criminal genes that are responsible for causing disease.

The pink coloured spots are how Zymo grows on HIGH nutrients, you can see the normal growth (on top) and the mutant (below) look the same! The second spot pictures show how Zymo grows on LOW nutrients – it forms finger-like projections called hyphae… but not our mutant! The pictures of the leaves show that the mutant is unable to cause disease! For more pictures of my work see the gallery below!

07:00 till 08:30 – wake up and get ready for work.

08:50 – Head to work.

This is Rothamsted Research!

09:00 – Get to my desk and switch my computer on. Make a cup of tea and check my emails. I like to make sure my laboratory notebook is up to date and make a to-do list that I can carry around with me for the day. If ever anyone needs to find me they can almost just follow the fluorescent orange sticky notes.

My desk, lovely view but it does get a bit cold in the winter!

09:30 – Check on my agar plates (how well are my microbes growing) and my plants (haircut time or water?) Sometimes my plants are grown in the greenhouses (when I need more space), but I often grow them on the window ledge in the laboratory! The wheat plants need three weeks to grow before I put Zymo (the fungus) on and after that another 10-21 days!

Baby wheat plants growing on the laboratory window ledge.

10:00 till 12:30 – A lot can happen during this time. If I need equipment sterilising or media (agar plates, broths…) in preparation for the next day/week this when I like to do it. Friday mornings at this time every fortnight or so my supervisor and I will meet to discuss how things are going and what I’ve got planned for the coming weeks.

When I have some fungus out on special agar plates or on plants, if they’re ready for photos I might get (some of) that done during this time. Sometimes when I am transforming Zymo’s DNA I won’t get to leave the laboratory for lunch until 13:30!

Transformation Tuesday! In this photo, I have mixed together Zymo and special bacteria, called Agrobacterium tumefaciens, that enables me to alter Zymo’s DNA. You can see I was using yellow sticky notes at the time…

12:30 ~ 13:30 – I tend to take a long lunch ‘break’ (unless my to-do list for the day is very long). Sometimes I also catch up with other PhD students. Other times I end up drafting emails to send later or spend time on some more creative projects.

This is the lab where I work, can you spot my sticky notes?

14:00 till 17:00 – Again depends on what needs doing. If all my lab work is done I might work from my desk for a bit, get confused by bioinformatics or frustrated with some presentation slides and then swap scenery and go sit in a space called ‘The Hub’ for a while. On Wednesdays, the ‘Science of Feeding the World’ group at Rothamsted meet to talk about science communication, public engagement and the new podcast!

Love these guys so much, if you have a chance do go check them out! They’re on Soundcloud and Spotify.