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Rhiannon Morris

Doctoral Candidate, protein biochemist, crystallographer and science communicator.

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365 days of science: July

On October 6, 2018 By rhiannonmorrissci

Over half way through 2018 now!

Screenshot 2018-10-06 11.33.14.png

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Storyboarding when making a presentation! . I promised a while ago that I would explain how I make my slides for talks and try to tell a story using the storyboarding technique so here it is! . . I believe that what makes a good presentation is the story that is told! You want to grab people’s attention, pull them in and keep them there with you the whole way. Think of a good movie you’ve seen, were you captivated early on? Did you stay captivated wanting to know what came next the whole time? Yep! That’s a good story! Try to do the same thing when you’re presenting your work! . . Storyboarding is something they do when making films, and is really just a way of stitching a story together from start to finish. Using this technique allows you to think and visualize the flow of your presentation and the overall message you want to convey. . . Start by asking yourself what the main message you want to convey is. Write this down. Now write down the all key points that support this message, no matter how big or how small, and write each of these on a separate bit of paper or PowerPoint slide. . . Arrange each of these points into a logical order that tells a story. If it works well for your mind, sketch out what you want to actually show on the slide. . . Look at the gaps in between each of the panels you have and think about flow. How do you go from one to the next. The importance of transitions in presentations is underrated. Good transitions can make a presentation! . . Put together the slides and practice! Sometimes planning something on paper doesn’t quote translate when it’s read out loud or presented, so practicing will show you where things should be adjusted. . . Make those adjustments and then keep tweaking things and improving your flow and story until it’s how you like and then practice practice practice! . . This technique is super easy and perhaps obvious. But some people probably don’t think to do it this way, and it makes the story part of the science come together a lot more readily. . . Good luck with your talks!

Today’s #TechniqueTuesday is the basics of Fluorescent Activated Cell Sorting or FACS and Flow Cytometry. . . FACS or what people often call flow cytometry is a technique that allows us to sort cells based on specific parameters. These include cell size or morphology or protein expression. . . A FACS sorter has a collection process and can sort your cells and put them into different wells based on their differences (like GFP expression for example) whereas flow cytometry analyzers don’t collect the cells - they simply analyze them as the name suggests. . . This technique is used by a wide range of people for varying experiments. Some people want to study the morphology of their cells, others want to see if a protein is present in the cell, some want to see if their cells have died, and like I mentioned earlier, counting and sorting are often needed to sort out populations of cell types from a mixture. Like pulling out the various ingredients from a fruit salad. . . Swipe to see a schematic! Depending on what you wish to measure or sort, the user changes the parameters of the analysis or sort to suit their needs. In the lab I often want to measure the expression of receptors on the surface of my cells, so we use an antibody conjugated to a fluorophore and use a specific laser to see what population of our cells express the receptor and at what level! . Do you use FACS or flow cytometry?

#YouSeeISee . I was inspired by @magnolia_med to make this post! I want to show that Instagram is highly curated and that you only see a tiny snap shot of what happens in my life! . . Where you see me posting pictures with my degrees, I see the years of hard work and dedication that went into achieving those piece of paper. The late nights, the exams, the study, the practice and the stress! . . Where you see pictures of my organized planner, I see many years of trial and error to find out what works for me and then time each week planning everything out meticulously. . . Where you see me finishing up my PhD, I see the almost 10 years of higher education and hard years to get to this stage. . . Where you see pictures of an experiment I did in the lab that worked, I see how many times that experiment failed before I got it working and optimized. . . Where you see pages and pages of pretty notes, I see the hours I spent combing through the learning materials committing it to memory. The long days I put into all my university work, persevering even when I didn’t achieve what I would have liked. . . Where you see high grades and good results, I see the failures I had and the resistance from people when getting back into it. . . Where you see good work life balance, I see years of overworking myself and burn out before learning how to manage my time effectively. . . . ANY TIME you look at my Instagram feed and think wow I wish I could do that, know that YOU CAN! I am just like anybody else, but spent my time working hard, overcoming failures, getting back up and trying again and again and again! . . Don’t forget that behind everything you see on Instagram is a bigger picture. Don’t waste your time stressing about what somebody else has that you don’t, instead focus your energy on being the best you can be and working towards that goal.

An atom is the smallest unit of ordinary matter. Atoms have a nucleus made up of protons and (usually) neutrons, and one or more electrons that are bound to the nucleus. . . Electrons are subatomic particles that have a negative charge. . . In crystallography we shoot X-rays at our crystals, which causes diffraction. We then measure the angles and intensities of the diffracted x-rays to generate a 3D map of all the electrons in the crystal lattice. We call this the electron density - from this the average positions of the atoms that make up the protein can be determined! We then build the amino acids into our electron density map and go through multiple refinements to generate the end result, the structural model of the protein. . . Today I thought I’d refresh my memory on some electron configurations because it’s been a while!

Baby, can't you see I'm calling A guy like you should wear a warning It's dangerous I'm falling . . Yes, those were Britney Spears, Toxic lyrics. 10/10 tune. . . But what does toxic mean and what is a toxin? . . If something is toxic, it is poisonous. A toxin is a poison that comes from a plant or animal! . . But remember that it’s the dose that makes the poison! We use toxins for many things that aren’t necessarily harmful. . . For example, Botox is actually Botulinum toxin - a neurotoxic protein produced by Clostridium botulinum (a bacterium). The toxin prevents the release of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from axon endings at the neuromuscular junction which causes flaccid paralysis. This is why people get Botox, to freeze them lines (and more useful things). . . Toxins can be cool! Also you don’t ever need to go on a cleanse to get rid of toxins in your body. If your kidneys and liver and lungs are working, you’re all good!

CHECK OUT OUR SHIRTS 😍 . . It’s the one month birthday of @also_ascientist!! Wooo!! In one month we have reached 5k followers on twitter, 1k on Instagram and our website has had over 20k views! We have also raised over $1000 USD from our stickers, shirts and donations which keeps us up and running. Thank you to everybody who has supported us so far! . . You can join us too! . Are you a human? Are you a scientist? Yes? AWESOME! You are a unique scientist too! You can support us by 1) following us and reading the posts! 2) submitting your own bio - it’s for everybody! Trust me, you are unique! 3) by buying a shirt or a sticker from @geniuslabgear 🎉🎉 . . Check it out and check us out! The more unique scientists the better! Find out more about @also_ascientist by checking out our website and social media!

If you know me well then you know that I love planning and being organized & that’s because I typically take on too many things at once and need to be very on top of it all or I forget everything! . . As a PhD student my main goal for this degree is to generate new data and make a unique contribution to science. That in itself requires a lot of planning and organization - but today I’m going to talk about all the extras, or what I like to call the frosting on the PhD cake I am baking. . . These frostings are things I’m doing during my PhD that don’t directly contribute to attaining that PhD but are in my opinion, still important. For example, I sit on 3 committees at my institute. I am a mentee in 2 programs, and a mentor in 1. I tutor a student in biochemistry. I volunteer for a not-for profit organization, and I also volunteer for various events at my institute from time to time. I am part of the @also_ascientist team where I do behind the scenes work and keep on top of the website. On top of that I obviously have this Instagram and twitter where I do science communication and sometimes it goes broader than that - I have been on the radio and invited to submit blog posts for various websites. THEN I also manage to have a life 💁🏻‍♀️ . It’s a lot of stuff, and I want to maintain as many of these things as possible while also maintaining some balance SO today I’m gonna tell you how I juggle all these things and how I found some of these opportunities! . . First, how did I end up doing all this stuff? How do you get involved? I’m sure that no matter where you work, whether it be an institute like me or at a university lab, there are committees you can sit on and programs in place for people to join. Seek them out, ask people and then find out how you can get involved! . . Second, how do I manage to do all this stuff and a PhD and have a life? I prioritize things that are most important and put the most work into those. The other things I do when I can/when I have to but I don’t go out of my way to do every day! A lot of these things only involve a few hours of my time every now and then! Sometimes you’ll be busy but being organized is key! You can do it!

As a structural biologist and biochemist 🧪 amino acids and proteins are my bread and butter & today I wanted to talk a little about what we call The central dogma of biology! . . Amino acids are the building blocks that make up your proteins, and proteins are like the little machines in the factory that is a cell! They get things done! . . The amino acid sequence of a protein is dictated by your DNA sequence and 3 DNA bases make a codon! . . The central dogma of biology describes the process by which information in genes flow into proteins or in more detail, how your DNA (your genes) undergo transcription into RNA (like a single stranded copy of your DNA) and then that RNA is involved in translation which produces your proteins by adding amino acids together sequentially! . . There are 64 codons that code for 20 amino acids and 3 stop codons that tell the ribosome to stop adding amino acids to the chain! . . When you have a mutation in your DNA causes what we call a missense mutation, one of your codon sequences will change and a different amino acid to the normal one can be added to a protein. In some cases this substitution will have no effect, but in others it will cause a change to the protein that makes it less or non functional! . . As structural biologists this is something we are particularly interested in! Understanding how amino acids in proteins interact and how when mutations occur these interactions are altered! . . Do you work on a mutation? If you do, are you aware of what that mutation does to your protein of interest?

How do you deal with and overcome failures? . . I get asked this question a lot. And I struggle to answer because I think it’s different for everybody. But failure is inherently part of all of our lives in one away or another! Particularly if you’re going to do science - there will be a lot of failure & so knowing how to not let that take the wind out of you is going to be important in your career but also in your general life! So here’s what I’ve learned over many years of failing! . . You just have to accept that you will fail from time to time. Everybody fails, but not everybody tries! And I’m a firm believer that you should always give something a try if you want it even if it might fail because it’s better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all. Changing your mindset about failure and accepting its part of life is really the first step to picking yourself back up. But you’re allowed to be sad or hurt by failure, just don’t let it consume you and prevent you from trying again. . . I always tell new students that they need to uncouple their self worth from their work and achievements because I know that the first roadblock they hit when they fail will hit so much harder. Having a setback of hitting that roadblock doesn’t mean that YOU as a person are a failure. Just because it went wrong this time doesn’t mean it will always go wrong! Try again! . . Remember that everybody fails and if you have a bad week or day or month find some friends and grab a coffee and chat about those moments where something went wrong and how you all got back on your feet. Sometimes you just need to talk it out and it’ll feel better and you’ll be ready to get back in there! . . Don’t let it get you stuck! Any time I have failed in life I have had my time to be sad but then I’ve stopped and I’ve made a plan and I’ve worked to get that plan to happen, and guess what? It always worked out well for me in the end! . . Remember that you can always learn and grow from your failures. What went wrong, what can you change next time? What one thing could you do differently? . . Any other tips about how to overcome setbacks and/or failure? Comment below!

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#366papers and #365daysofscience

Rhiannon is passionate about science communication and has made an effort to showcase how amazing science can be while also giving an insight into what a day in the life of a scientist is like.

In 2016 Rhiannon read a paper a day as part of her #366papers challenge and then in 2018 she posted a picture a day on instagram of something sciencey to give people a glimpse into her life as a PhD student. This was her #365daysofscience challenge. Both of these she has posted about here on her blog!

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