Ellen’s First Year Blog: Recap of Christmas

Hello again! I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas, and I wish you a Happy New Year!

Well, my first semester certainly flew by. HOW have we covered SO much content in our lectures? There is a lot I’ve had to revise over the holidays, you should see the mountains of flip cards laid out on my desk. January exams will be interesting to say the least.

Anyway, last time I posted was just before the 1^st year life sciences poster presentation. Every week we have a tutorial, where you and a group of 7 other people on your course meet up with your tutor to learn about things such as how to correctly refrence, how to structure essays and write abstracts. One of our tasks was to create a poster on a topic of our choice. We chose the disease Progeria; a rare genetic disease which causes premature aging. A mutation of the LMNA gene leads to the formation of the protein progerin which makes the nucleus of cells unstable, preventing cells from dividing properly. The average life expectancy is only 13 years of age, and world wide there are only 37 known cases. We spent a whopping 6 hours on Monday making our poster, which included a rotating clock face featuring clock hands made of chromosome 1 (where the LMNA gene locus is found). Once completed, we had to display our poster along side all the other tutorial group’s posters which were then judged by both students and tutors. Even though we didn’t win anything (£20 gift vouchers were up for grabs!) we got a fair few compliments on our snazzy clock design and got to have free tea and cakes – which obviously I took full advantage of with my sweet tooth.

A normal Nucleus compared to a Nucleus affected by Progeria