On Ho-li-day!

From today all will be quiet on the blogging front for two weeks. I'm off on holiday! Yay! I'll bring you back a gift ok?

Stem Base Assessments

Lately I've been looking at a lot of wheat stem bases to find eyespot disease, using a method designed by Goulds & Polley. I felt like playing around with MS Powerpoint and making a flow chart from their assessment key to make it easier to digest. I'm no maestro when it comes to design but here's what I came up with:

What Do You Even Do Anyway?

I get asked a lot by friends and family who aren't necessarily familiar with the academic system what the heck I actually do. I decided that I would respond to these FAQs and try to write about my PhD project in a way that doesn't make non-scientists start weeping and clawing at their eyes out of sheer boredom.

Science.

Ok, so, what is a PhD?

PhD means "Doctor of Philosophy" or "a person who thinks a lot about stuff". These three letters are awarded to people who have written a mighty long thesis (I'm talking a monstrous report, at least two inches thick and hard-bound y'all) and gone through a gruelling interview after spending 3-4 long years devoting their lives to a very specific topic which nobody but them gives a hoot about.

PhD projects often begin when someone at a university (who usually becomes the project supervisor) comes up with an idea that they think is interesting and posts it on findaphd.com (other PhD finding sites are available). This idea could be about desiging a fancy new machine, analysing a poet's works, interviewing the public, proving or disproving a theory, and so on.

The would-be-supervisor convinces someone with money (a charity, an independent body, a company, the government) that your idea really is worth forking out for and if you're lucky they get people on board who can pay for things like laboratory costs (commonly £1000 per year for one student to have lab space), a wage or "stipend" for the student (around £13,000 pa at my university) and consumables; like printing, chemicals, blue plastic gloves and other things you might desperately need. In return for you providing them with some most excellent data and results of course.

Trust me, it's an achievement.
This image came from this blog which you should read if considering a PhD yourself.

Wage..? Hang on, you get paid for being a tax-dodging student bum?!

Yes, it's such an intense few years that it's unlikely most PhD students would be able to do a "real" job as well as study and we all need to pay the bills! (Well we don't pay council tax but, you know, all the other bills). From the funder's point of view, paying a stipend to a student means they shell out less than they perhaps would employing a career-researcher, plus they get to make useful business connections with universities.

In my case, alongside my university, the HGCA (Home Grown Cereals Authority) provide most of my funding. They take a levy from sales of a farmer's cereal crop, such as wheat, which they use to fund PhD studentships, resarch and development, crop market info and marketing for the cereal farming world. At first I was surprised when I found out that money was being taken from farmers to fund my work (it did add a bit of pressure to get some decent results), but I figured that if someone didn't pay for research into new methods then we wouldn't progress to bigger and better farming practises. It should all save farmers money in the long term so hopefully they aren't too cross!

I am also funded by FERA (The Food and Environment Research Agency) which is an offshoot of the governmental body DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). As well as financial support, they provide me with opportunities to work in their labs and to hob-nob with professionals in the plant biology business. The experience of working in a business environment compared to a university one is something I have really enjoyed. University life can be like living in a bubble and getting out there into the workplace is eye-opening.

 

What's your work about?

My working thesis title is: Development of novel methods of detecting and quantifying viable inoculum of Oculimacula yallundae and Oculimacula acuformis.

That's a bit of a mouthful so, first things first, Oculimacula yallundae and O. acuformis are the names for the two species of fungus which causes eyespot disease of cereal crops. "Oculimacula" comes from the latin "oculos" meaning "eye" and "macula" meaning "spot". Logical. It looks like this:

Eyespot on wheat. Image borrowed without permission from Dr Paul Dyer.I hope he doesn't mind!

It might not look like much but when the fungus grows through the stem it interrupts the flow of water up the stem and can weaken the stem so much that the plant collapses.

The aim of my work is to design a new method in the lab which people can use to test samples of plants to see: how much fungus is there, which of the two species is present and whether it is alive and able to cause disease. I can't tell you much about this fancy test because it's TOP SECRET (and this has nothing to do with the fact that I haven't actually finished the work yet... *cough*). In theory this will help people decide early in the wheat's growth whether they have the disease and whether they need to spray on some fungicides to kill it off before it does too much damage.

 

And instead of getting on with it, you spend all your time writing blogs instead of doing anything productive?

Admittedly I do spend a bit of time writing blogs but I think it is productive because it helps me practice my writing. If I'm behind with my jobs I'll work into the evening to finish things off. My building usually has PhD students in it during evenings and weekends, outside of 9-5 is often the best time to get things done. It's quiet and you don't have to fight for machines in the lab. On the flip-side they don't put the heating on at the weekends so it can get really very cold.

Aside from my office work (writing reports, making posters, sending emails) I have lab work to do developing that TOP SECRET method I mentioned and I also have field and polytunnel (i.e. a big long tent) trials on the go.

This means I spend time not only in my white coat and gloves but also in my wheat field in wellies and waterproofs squealing because there are creepy-crawlies, or in the tunnel tending to my potted wheat, counting its leaves and so forth. I need to grow the crop I'm studying so I can prove that my work in the lab actually can be useful in the field to help crops grow better. There have been some cases where things that work like clockwork in the lab completely fail when you take them into a real-world situation, so I'm trying to make sure I've got all my bases covered.

For those city types who don't know what a field looks like.

 

What's the plan today then super scientist?

Yeah this one wasn't an FAQ, I made that one up myself, nobody, not even my mother has ever called me a super scientist *sigh*. In case you were wondering, today's job list is here:

• Get hold of some compost and sterilise it.
• Pick up some little pots from the potting shed.
• Get a poster printed.
• Run a PCR (that's a method for increasing the amount of DNA you have in a tube by making lots of copies).
• Go to the field and get some diseased plants for testing.
• Make up a DNA extraction chemical mixture (one of my favourite jobs because it's just like following a cooking recipe).
• Count number of dead leaves on plants in the polytunnel.

Whoever said science isn't glamourous was probably working with anaerobic digestate (that's sewage folks!).

That's it about it then huh?

Yeah! Thanks for reading! I hope that helped you understand what I do, if you were bothered in the first place. I'm sorry to disappoint if you thought this might be a blog on snail populations in Madagascar. Let me know if you find any science that you would like translating into normal-person-speak and I'll do my very best to help!