Postgraduate Research Student:
Jennifer Lynch

PhD student since September 2000.

Professional Affiliations: American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS), British Mass Spectrometry Society (BMSS).

Originally from Stow Massachusetts, I attended the University of Massachusetts at Boston. After graduating with a BS in Biology, I began working for a hazardous waste management company, Clean Harbors, working in the organic analytical laboratory. The work involved the extraction of waste samples for the analysis of PCB's, Pesticides, Herbicides and BNA's. The analysis was by GC and purge and trap GC/MS. Other responsibilities included heading up the Safety Committee.

After working for Clean Harbors for 4 years I began work at Harvard University Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the Mass Spectrometry Laboratory. The facility has 5 mass spectrometers; 2 JEOL magnetic sectors equipped for EI, CI and FAB ionization, a Micromass Platform I quadrupole with ESI and APCI ionization, a Micromass LCT time-of-flight with ESI, and a Perseptive Biosystems MALDI/TOF. The facility performs analysis in support of the research undertaken in the department. I worked for the department for 5 and a half years and was then recruited by Dr. Pat Langridge-Smith to join EMSG at the University of Edinburgh.

The ultimate objective of this project is to use mass spectrometry in conjunction with a variety of liquid-phase separation techniques to determine the acetylation states of histones in one cell and compare them to the acetylation states of histones in another cell to further the understanding of cell reprogramming. That's the pie in the sky goal!

There must be some way out of here...

My research has focused on the analysis of histones using a Micromass Q-Tof. Histones are a type of protein found in the nucleus of eukaryotic cells. The DNA of the eukaryotic cell nucleus is associated with histones to form nucleosomes, which represent the basic structural subunit of chromatin. There are 5 classes of histones: H1, H2A, H2B, H3 and H4, each comprising numerous subtypes. In this work, the variants of histones from chicken etherythrocytes, mouse liver and sheep liver cells have been profiled using gel electrophoresis followed by MALDI, electrospray (ESI) mass spectrometry and HPLC-MS.