My name is Yin Xin Ho and I am a 2nd year PhD student working under the supervision of Dr. Lynne Prince and Dr. Ashley Cadby. My project involves developing and using super-resolution microscopy techniques to understand neutrophil and Staphylococcus aureus interaction. Neutrophils are the most abundant white blood cells in our blood and are crucial immune defenders against S.aureus, a highly adaptive pathogen that causes wide range of infections.
| S.aureus have evolved ways to overcome neutrophil killing. One of these is to cause neutrophil to burst, thus escaping and causing infection elsewhere. The goal of my project is to understand how S.aureus disarms neutrophils in order to find ways to boost the host defence against this pathogen. My project is highly interdisciplinary, which means that I spend my time between the Medical School and Biophysical Imaging Centre (BICEN) in the department of Physics and Astronomy. |  A high-resolution image of neutrophil (red) containing S. aureus (green) taken using the Airyscan microscope in the Wolfson Light Microscopy Facility. |
A typical day in medical school involves getting blood from volunteers in the morning to isolate neutrophils for my experiments. Over in BICEN, I work alongside physicists, engineers and chemists to build microscope, as well as to use the microscopes that are developed in the lab to image my samples.
 A density gradient to isolate different populations of blood cells |
