NHMRC Project underway
It’s a rollercoaster ride. After the pandemic removed us to our home office for most of last year, what looked so bleak turned into a heap of excitement with the new year. Canberra has done amazingly and managed to stay largely free of Covid-19 and with a vaccine in sight, that will hopefully continue. With 2021 now in full swing, there is an infectious buzz in the CVR lab! It’s energising to be part of such a dynamic and collegial team.
I’m excited to have started establishing the Spatial Transcriptomics technology in the lab. Spatial Transcriptomics is a cutting-edge next generation high-throughput sequencing technology that allows us to identify expression differences at distinct locations within a given tissue to near single cell resolution. This technology has been used in cancer research and has already opened new insights into why some tumours are invasive while others are not. We will use this to gain a detailed understanding into how retinal cells respond to stress and damage depending on their location relative to the site of damage. I am convinced that this state-of-the-art technology will transform our understanding of the degenerating retina and will open new avenues for therapeutic development. As with any new experiment, I am now fine-tuning the technique and solving some problems. Watch this space!