29 November, 5.30 pm Kloostri ait. Tallinn

We have highly complex bodies with fingers, toes, kidneys, lungs – all in a very specific arrangement. And yet we all developed from a single egg cell… How do your organs ‘know’ where to form? Why does your little finger always go on the ‘outside’ of your hand, and your thumb on the ‘inside’? Why not the other way round? And why don’t you see people walking around with legs coming out of their shoulders, or hands coming out of the middle of their abdomens?

These are all examples of a scientific biological phenomenon called pattern formation. Looking around in everyday life, you will see many examples of patterns. From exotic things like the stripes on zebras and tigers, down to everyday things we take for granted, like why the vast majority of us have five fingers, and not three or fifteen – all of this has to be programmed in when animals and humans develop.

In this talk, Dr Sarah Forbes-Robertson will look at some of the genes and mechanisms involved in pattern formation in development, and answer some of these questions. You will learn how it’s possible to make chickens with four wings, and whether snakes can ever grow legs…

Who is Sarah Forbes-Robertson?

Sarah is a post-doctoral research fellow at the School of Medicine, Swansea University, UK. She graduated from Bristol University, and gained her Ph.D. from University College London. Since then, she has worked in Guys Hospital and Brunel University, in London, and in Cardiff University.

Sarah is a molecular biologist – working on DNA and RNA, looking at gene expression. Her particular fields of interest are cancer, ageing and development – how we go from a single fertilised egg cell to a fully-formed human being with all the bits in the right places, and then how it goes downhill from there! At the moment, she is working in the Human Cancer Studies Group at the Swansea Medical School. She is researching whether there are any single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with cancer risk, specifically in people exposed to radiation after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986.

She was the Welsh Finalist for Famelab 2006, a national competition to find the new faces of science communication in the UK. She also won the public vote for the 99 second podcast on Channel 4 website. In just a minute and a half, Sarah explained what makes an octopus different from other sea life!