Eleanor Calcutt

I am an undergraduate student studying Biological Sciences at Durham University, currently here at EI as a year in industry student. During this year, I hope to discover more about genomics, an interest that was sparked during my first two years of my degree. I hope to use the year to expand my knowledge in the field and apply the theories and techniques I have learned previously to my own research project.

My year in industry project is a collaboration between multiple faculty groups: the Macaulay, Haerty and Swarbreck groups and Genomic Pipelines. Over the past decade, significant advances have been made in single-cell RNA sequencing. Smart-seq3 is a new single-cell RNA sequencing protocol published by Hagemann-Jenson et al., 2020; I will be working to establish a Smart-seq3 pipeline within EI. This will involve performing a comparison between Smart-seq3 and Smart-seq2 (the current protocol used), for their use in single-cell analysis of human cancer cell lines to assess gene expression heterogeneity.

I will then work towards building a 384-well plate Smart-seq3 pipeline, which could potentially enable parallel sequencing of up to 1,536 cells in a single experiment. During my project I will gain experience in cell sorting, method development, laboratory automation, next generation sequencing and the associated bioinformatic skills to enable me to analyse my own sequencing data.