Country of origin: Kuwait
Subject: Medical Science (CIMR)
Matriculation year: 2021
My MPhil was focused on the study myosin motors in the C. elegans model organism. In August, I submitted my thesis and completed an oral defense. My research, titled ‘The characterisation of two MYO6 homologues in C. elegans and their comparison to human MYO6’, explored the actin-based myosin motors of class VI. In humans and other mammals, myosin VI (MYO6) motors are in involved in a myriad of cellular processes, including in short-range transport during endocytosis, protein secretion, and in the anchoring of actin filaments. Importantly, they are implicated in several various human diseases, including in prostate and ovarian cancers, cardiomyopathy, and neurodegeneration. Utilising C. elegans as a model could therefore aid in the search for clinical drugs that modulate MYO6 activity. For this to happen, a comprehensive cellular, biochemical, and biophysical characterisation of the two MYO6 motors in C. elegans, HUM-3 and HUM-8, needs to be carried out. My MPhil project and associated thesis thus aimed to establish the grounds for this work.
Over the past year, I’ve focused predominantly on the molecular and cellular study of HUM-3 and HUM-8. I’ve optimised various techniques to establish the C. elegans branch within the Buss lab. The first part of my project focused on utilising bioinformatics tools to gain a comparative look into the sequences and predicted structures of both MYO6 homologues in the worm. The second major part of my project involved the use of super-resolution confocal microscopy for comprehensive imaging of the cellular and tissue localisations of HUM-3 and HUM-8 endogenously within the worm. The third part of my project focused on expressing HUM-3 and HUM-8 in mammalian tissue culture cells for direct comparison to mammalian MYO6. I also looked at the regulation of HUM-3 and HUM-8 expression using alternative splicing, which produces different isoforms of a particular protein by adding/removing nucleotides to expressed mRNA. Overall, the study found that although HUM-3 and HUM-8 show distinct properties (tissue distributions and regulation) within C. elegans and when expressed in mammalian cells, there are similarities in endogenous localisation and function when the C. elegans MYO6s are individually compared to human MYO6.
I completed my undergraduate degree in Molecular Biology at the University of Edinburgh.