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Down’s syndrome happens when a baby ends up with an extra copy of a chromosome. Chromosomes are found in the nucleus of a cell and are made up of DNA, which is the information that your body needs to tell it how to work, for example that you should have green eyes and brown hair etc.

A healthy cell should have 46 chromosomes – 23 of these come from the dad’s sperm and the other 23 from the mum’s egg. Babies born with Down’s syndrome have 47 chromosomes instead of 46, because their mother’s egg had an extra chromosome. This extra chromosome leads to lots of serious problems for the baby.  Older mothers are more likely to have eggs with the wrong number of chromosomes, because their eggs are older.

What we are really interested in is seeing if the eggs from older mothers are missing a key molecule which is important for controlling how many chromosomes the egg has. If we find out what this key molecule is and put it into eggs from older mothers we think we might be able to make their eggs better and help them to have healthy babies with the right number of chromosomes. We don’t know what this special ingredient is yet but we are testing a few ideas!

To get this special molecule into the eggs we use a technique called microinjection. You can see a picture of the view down the microscope in the picture below.

The egg is the round thing in the middle of the picture (really it is about the size of a full stop but the super powerful microscope we use means we can see it). On the right is the injection pipette filled with the special molecule we want to inject and on the left is the holding pipette which holds the egg still so we can inject it. Here is a picture of me doing some microinjection.

In the left of picture you can what looks like a joystick. There are lots of different joysticks which we need to use to move the eggs around and to inject them – it’s a bit like playing a computer game so it takes a bit of practice to begin with – but when you get the hang of it its really fun! These are some egg which have been injected – they have turned green as the molecule we injected them with was labelled with a fluorescent green dye!

After we have injected this molecule we put the cells in a incubator which is at 37oC (body temperature) so the eggs are warm and happy. We leave them in the incubator for a few hours so this molecule can get to work. Then later we label the chromosomes with a dye which turns them blue and then look at them under a special (and very expensive!) microscope. We can then take a pretty photo of the egg and count the number of chromosomes to check if they have the correct number.

I start the day by cycling to work. I cycle right past Big Ben and the London Eye which is cool (well, only if its good weather!) Then when I get to work, I usually check my emails and think about what I’m going to do for the rest of the day. Next I have to go and start my experiment in the lab. This involves looking down a lot of different microscopes! You can see the lab in the photo below.

When I’m doing an experiment I usually have some gaps where I am waiting for something to happen to my cells. Then I go to my office which is next to the lab. In the office I look at some of my results and plan more experiments to do. There are 4 other girls in my office and we have a lot of fun. Sometimes the people next door tell us off for laughing too loud! This is the office and one of my buddies Jenny who is working hard!

Some days I go to talks given by other scientists, or we have a lab meeting to discuss our results with other members of the lab and to get their opinions on our data. The best thing about my job is that no two days are exactly the same, so it is difficult to get bored!