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In school, I always thought I’d end up doing something related to music and Irish, because I was good at the former and fluent in the latter. But then GO TOBANN in my leaving cert years, I discovered that not only did I love science, I was good at it. Years later, I’m a microbiology graduate working on a PhD in a fancy lab doing fancy science. I genetically engineer microbes to produce a kind of sticky glue that barnacles make in the oceans. In my spare time, I love a good marathon (of Netflix shows) and travelling to interesting cities.

Evolution has provided some WACKY creatures that do WACKY things. Barnacles are able to stick to just about any surface you can imagine with this really, really sticky glue-like cement, and it works underwater. Rather than trying to grow thousands of barnacles and harvest the glue, I steal the gene for the glue, and shove it into a bacterial species called E. coli. Bacteria, as you know, are really, really small. So I can have billions of bacteria in a small flask, all busy making glue, and I never have to leave the lab.

I do some interesting things to some bacterial cells to make them susceptible to taking up foreign DNA. I mess with the cell membrane (the outer part of the cell) and make it “leaky” so that DNA can get in more easily. Then I use electricity to force foreign DNA inside, and let the cells recover (they’ve had a hard day). Then I let the cells multiply and take out my product when it’s ready!