Adam Callan-Sidat

I am currently in the first year of the Medical Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership (MRC DTP) in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research at the University of Warwick. I have just completed the taught moiety of the MSc year, and am now in the first of two eleven-week mini-projects. I will then transfer to the PhD course and complete a three-year project. 

My undergraduate Biochemistry MBio degree was also here at the University of Warwick. My third year mini-project was with Dr Karuna Sampath, studying the function of RNA-binding proteins in Danio rerio (zebrafish). This project confirmed my desire to pursue a research career, and augmented the interest in RNA regulation that I had garnered throughout my undergraduate course.

I followed my interest in RNA regulation to Dr Emma Denham in Warwick Medical School, where I spent my fourth year industrial placement studying RNA regulation in the Gram-positive soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis. I globally mapped RNA-RNA interactions in vivo, by crosslinking and ligating base-paired RNAs, then sequencing the resulting chimeras. A grant from the Microbiology Society gave me the opportunity to present my work at their 2017 annual conference in Edinburgh. An aspect of this project that I enjoyed a lot more than anticipated was the data analysis, which sparked my interest in bioinformatics.

The taught modules of the MRC DTP were similar to those I took during the Master’s year of my MBio, so I was initially sceptical of how useful they would prove. However, I was very pleasantly surprised, since all of the modules either provided me with new skills or honed existing ones. Modules that particularly stood out were statistics for data analysis (CH923), quantitative skills for system biology (LF903), and computational modelling (CH925). These modules gave me a base in programming and modelling that has already proven valuable in my first mini-project.

My first mini-project with Dr Tauqeer Alam is focused on understanding the global impact of enzyme-activator interactions on metabolism. This is a computational investigation that will involve the construction of a genomic-scale enzyme-activation network, by mapping activator information to a human metabolic reconstruction. This network will be used to study if and how enzyme-activator interactions evolved, and how they affect metabolism. It will also be combined with a previously established enzyme-inhibition network to further study metabolism.

I will then return to the lab, and the world of RNA, for my experimental mini-project with Dr Daniel Hebenstreit. The Hebenstreit lab is focused on biological noise, particularly stochastic variation in transcription.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions about the course or how to apply.