Kristian Rutenberg-Houchen

I study Biomedical Sciences at Newcastle University - I am currently going to starting my third and final year of my undergraduate degree after this summer

I am doing a Wellcome Trust funded Summer Studentship for 8 weeks in Holm's lab. I have enjoyed studying immunology at university and wanted to gain more experience in a research environment taking on a small research project that had ties to the immunology I have been learning at university. I approached Holm, as I live in West Oxfordshire and would be home for the summer and I wanted to learn more about the complex immunology driving the pathophysiology seen in IBD. 

Holm and Sumeet have designed a short project using laser capture micro-dissection (LCM) to isolate granuloma tissue from formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded archived tissue blocks in order to establish whether there may be a bacterial species associated with the formation of granulomas seen in the epithelium of some Crohn's Disease patients. The process has required establishing a suitable protocol that can efficiently amplify the bacterial 16S rRNA gene from the small amount of tissue isolated by LCM, as the granuloma-containing tissue sections are a finite resource. The 16S PCR product is then sent for sequencing to identify the bacterial species in the sample.