The Group Poster is that which was made by myself and four other students as part of the Introduction to cellular systems and biomolecules module for those students without a biological background.

The poster is a presentation of the work contained within a paper on apoptosis in Caenorhabditis elegans. This was a focus on the structure of a dimer formed by CED-4 and CED-9, and the importance of this structure in apoptosis, during the development of C. elegans.

For my first mini-project, I was investigating the effects of larval crowding in Drosophila melanogaster, with the aim being that of using cDNA microarrays to find the global differences in mRNA expression levels between larvae in different densities (controlled by varying the number of mating pairs).

Due to problems with supply, we were unable to perform the microarray analysis. However, following an in depth literature search, quantitative PCR was carried out upon six target and two control genes.

This Drosophila mini-project poster was presented at the joint Manchester/Warwick Systems DTCs conference and the Warwick Systems Biology DTC Summer conference, both 2008.

The project was supervised by Dave Chandler and Eugene Ryabov (Warwick HRI), and Kevin Moffat (Biological Sciences).

My third poster of the year was for the second mini-project and was presented on the final day of the MSc course. It details the methods and results of my attempts to utilise transcriptional modules as a tool for finding motifs de novo in time series data, here using expression data for leaf senescence in Arabidopsis thaliana.

We utilised the transcriptional module generator presented by Kundaje et al. applied across significantly differentially regulated genes, considering all motifs possible (of length six). Utilising a bootstrapping technique and taking the most significant results (in terms of motifs), extensions were applied to the motif candidates, before re-running. Iterating this process was designed to serve as a motiv finder de novo.

This work was carried out with Sascha Ott, utilising data provided by Vicky Buchanan-Wollaston.

The poster was presented at the end of the MSc - late September 2008.