Question: Is it interesting what you do at work?

Mae Woods answered on 19 Jun 2012:

Hi bmx4life247.

Good question. Yes it is really interesting. I get to look at how a frog egg changes into a tadpole and I can do this by looking at the egg under a microscope.

Over time the egg splits up into more and more cells and changes color as it does so. I am interested in these special cells called the Neural Crest cells and these cells can move around the egg together like a swarm of bees.

I have lots of movies of these cells crawling around and the biologists want to know how they move the way they do. This is because sometimes the cells start moving in a bad way and when this happens the frogs get very sick. The idea is that if we know how they move, then we can stop them form moving in a bad way and because frog cells are similar to human cells this will help sick people as well.

So… the fun part is making up the mathematics from what I see. I look at the movies for a very very very long time and do some statistics to see if there are any special ways in which the cells bump into each other. Then I create a number of different ways in which I think the cells are moving and put them into a mathematical equation.

This Maths equation tells us how a group of cells will move over time and I use a computer to solve the equation and show me how the cells are moving. I have uploaded two new pictures of this for you to see on my profile.

It is really interesting because I use the biology in an equation and I have to wait patiently for the computer to give me the results. When the computer cells behave like the real cells, this is very exciting.