Miss Bridget Power

I am a final year Wellcome Trust PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Molecular Parasitology at the University of Glasgow. The focus of my PhD is to delineate the epigenetic regulatory mechanisms responsible for gametocytogenesis (sexual development) of the rodent malaria parasite, Plasmodium berghei. I have applied many molecular techniques in my aim to characterise these mechanisms so far, including complete knockout and conditional knockdown of a number of histone deacetylases/acetyltransferases; mass spectrometry analyses of histones at both schizont (asexual) and gametocyte (sexual) stages, with a focus on post-translational modifications (PTMs); and I am currently applying "ChIPmentation" (a combination of chromatin-immunoprecipitation sequencing and library preparation by Tn5 transposase) to identify areas of the genome that are subject to transcriptional regulation at H4K8Ac, H3K122Ac, and H3K64Me3, marks that differ between asexual and sexual parasite stages. My work is closely related to that of Dr Sebastian Kirchner, also at the Wellcome Centre for Molecular Parasitology in Glasgow and presenting a poster at the BSP 2017 meeting.