Research interests
My current research interests lie in neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease due to the production of amyloid-β plaques. I am particularly interested in the antimicrobial hypothesis of amyloid-β and its involvement in the innate immune response to pathogenic agents. During my PhD project, I will be investigating the mechanisms of amyloid-β production in response to systemic infection using different model systems and how these mechanisms may be altered during ageing to cause Alzheimer’s disease pathology. The project aim is to be able to interfere with the interactions and signalling pathways that promote amyloid-β production in response to systemic infection to delay the progression of neurodegeneration during ageing.
My undergraduate research project was in the field of reproductive medicine in the Ellis laboratory at the University of Kent. The aim of the project was to understand how alternative splicing of the ZFY transcription factor affected its stucture and function during spermatogenesis. During this project I expressed and purified the acidic domain from the spliced isoform, and carried out bioinformatic analysis to identify a motif with the potential to activate transcription in the long isoform and understand its conservation across different species using both gene and protein sequence alignments. I also used bioinformatics to investigate the protein’s DNA binding domain. Finally, I designed primers and carried out site directed mutagenesis to understand how the motif identified affects the function of ZFY.
During my undergraduate degree, I undertook a year in industry at Givaudan UK Ltd where I completed a microbiology research project.
Research project: Microbes and the ageing brain: do host-microbe interactions accelerate age-related cognitive decline?
Supervisors:
Professor Jessica Teeling
Dr Marina Ezcurra (University of Kent)
Funding Agency: BBSRC – SoCoBio DTP
Research group
Neuroscience
Affiliate research group
Southampton Neuroscience Group (SoNG)
