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bioreactor & dissection kit

I “inherited” this dissection kit when I joined Finian Martin’s lab almost 20 years ago. It used to belong to Eileen Furlong, who is now a hugely successful scientist and Head of the Genome Biology Unit at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. I also seem to have inherited her love of cell fate!

This small plastic container is a bioreactor used for moderate size culture of stem cell derived organoids (small spheres of tissue specific cells). The nascent organoids need to be agitated by stirring them very slowly for up to 100 days!

small items and phate map

This small vial labelled B-27 contained a supplement that promotes the growth of neuronal cell lineages. We also grow ‘mini-brains’ which we are using at the moment to model addition to cocaine and heroin.

The long thin shiny gold needle is a special pipette tip we use in the lab. These tips contain a gold-plated electrode for the delivery of a high electric field to enable gene editing in stem cells.

Growing and maintaining stem cells in culture requires specialised media and support matrices. When these stem cells develop into organoids they are maintained in suspension culture in low attachment 6 well cell culture plates, like the one seen here, and very gently stirred.

Data printout: Using single cell gene expression coupled with newly developed bioinformatic tools, we can now trace the origin of specific populations of cells within a complex environment; to see where a cell has “come from”. This image is akin to a map that helps us see what the data we are collecting is actually telling us.

small items and phate map

This small vial labelled B-27 contained a supplement that promotes the growth of neuronal cell lineages. We also grow ‘mini-brains’ which we are using at the moment to model addition to cocaine and heroin.

The long thin shiny gold needle is a special pipette tip we use in the lab. These tips contain a gold-plated electrode for the delivery of a high electric field to enable gene editing in stem cells.

Growing and maintaining stem cells in culture requires specialised media and support matrices. When these stem cells develop into organoids they are maintained in suspension culture in low attachment 6 well cell culture plates, like the one seen here, and very gently stirred.

Data printout: Using single cell gene expression coupled with newly developed bioinformatic tools, we can now trace the origin of specific populations of cells within a complex environment; to see where a cell has “come from”. This image is akin to a map that helps us see what the data we are collecting is actually telling us.

beads on a string and time

included by Lorna Donlon

During the course of my degree in Cell and Molecular Biology I was surprised time and again by the textile nature of the structures I was learning about. DNA is typically described as ‘the thread of life’ and it astounds me that microscope images revealing a ‘beads on a string’ pattern are actually capturing the reality of how DNA exists within our cells. The work going on in John’s lab is built on physical interactions that are happening at the level of these microscopic bead-like structures that determine the accessibility of the DNA at any given time.

Our experience tells us that life moves in a forward trajectory from birth to death with a myriad of physical states and stages in between. Cells move forwards in their development from having a ‘stemness’, a capacity to turn into a cell of any kind, towards being more and more like the cell they are destined to be. Coincident with this streamlining for specific function within the developing heart, lung, muscle or skin cell for example, is a loss of this ‘open’ quality of ‘stemness’ and possibility.

That this process of cell development can actually be reversed, that a skin cell can be sent backwards in time to regain this quality of ‘stemness’ and hence forwards in time again, in a different direction, with a new cell fate, is so awesome, alarming and miraculous to me that my mind still struggles to accept it. That this is possible through the work of a handful of transcription factors, proteins that physically interact with DNA, makes it all the more wondrous and incredible.

Researcher Profile

john crean

Originally from Dublin, John’s formative years were idyllically spent in Cootehill, Co. Cavan. He now lives in Stepaside with wife, Catherine, teenage children, Eva and Chloe, and their ferocious feline, Fudgy

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john crean

Originally from Dublin, John’s formative years were idyllically spent in Cootehill, Co. Cavan. He now lives in Stepaside with wife, Catherine, teenage children, Eva and Chloe, and their ferocious feline, Fudgy

Find Out More

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