This week I spoke with the amazing Robin Horton, where they bring us on a journey from Photosynthesis, their three favourite proteins and a 4500 year old Mesopotamian board game!
Hello, Robin! Thank you for speaking with me today. For those who haven't met you before, can you tell me a bit about yourself and your background?
Hey everyone! I'm Robin. That's me! I did my undergraduate degree here at Cambridge in Natural Sciences, and I have a history of not being able to make decisions, like, ever.
That’s seems to be a trend in the NanoDTC...
It very much is! The way the Natural Sciences degree works here is that you can do all the sciences in your first year, and then in second year they try to force you into making a decision to choose one of the sciences. But I was like, no, I'm not going to do that! So I did physics and biochemistry. And for the final two years I decided that I would focus on physics, but with a healthy dose of doing-all-the-nonstandard-modules.
And why did you decide to join the NanoDTC?
Honestly, because of my inability to make decisions! I was looking at individual PhD projects with individual research groups, and while they were doing really cool stuff, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Also, this was coming out of a pandemic and I didn't feel like it was the right time to make really difficult decisions about my future. I applied to the NanoDTC simply because they had so many lists of all different kinds of projects that people had done which looked exciting and it really just gave me the ability to put off decision making for another year. I didn’t think I’d actually get in, but I thought I’d give it a go regardless!
That’s understandable Robin! Getting to know you the past year Robin, it's very obvious how passionate you are about science! But why do you love science? Why not study something else?
What I like about science is the endless questions. I guess since the dawn of humanity we've always asked questions about the world, and science is just answering those questions, right? That's all it is. Growing up, I was always asking questions about everything, and sometimes you could find out the answers and when you do that is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant feeling. It's the thrill of discovery really! The feeling and joy of uncovering stuff new and exciting!
Another factor that led to science was that I had a really amazing biology teacher in school, and he really inspired me to want to discover things, to find out things, to answer questions and to be curious. I guess I'm just a curious person, and that really led me to science!
In terms of not doing something else, I mean ideally I’d like to do everything, but that’s sadly not possible!
Can you briefly tell me about your first year in the NanoDTC? I’m finding it quite intense at the moment!
Oh, it is intense. It's a lot of information to take in all at once, but also all the information is quite exciting! During my first year, I liked the ability to try out different things, for example I really loved NanoIntegration.
For those that don't know, can you explain what NanoIntegration is?
It's an extended project with a research group in a lab here at Cambridge and you have to help them solve a problem they currently have in the lab. Throughout the project, you learn how to use micro controllers, like Arduino sets, and you use these to help the group build solve things that will help solve their problem! And I love building stuff!
What have you built previously? What do you like to build?
Good question! When I was in 6th form, I would make calculators, only, like, 8-bit calculators because my available breadboards were quite small! I also liked to make radios and things like that. I never got the chance to go any further than that
until the NanoDTC so it was really nice to be able to learn how to interface programming and those kinds of devices. Oh! I also make ancient board games sometimes! My favourite boardgame I made is a replica of the Royal Game of Ur, which is a 4500 year old ancient Mesopotamian board game!
I can tell you're excited just thinking about it! What did you make throughout your NanoIntegration Project?
We made a CO2 sensor flow system for the lab. Inside the lab we were working with, they had supercapacitors and when they charge and discharge them they can do carbon capture in the capacitor. But they were doing all of this statically, which wasn't ideal! Their setup involved a big chamber which they would fill and then they would charge the capacitor. After this, they measure the pressure change to see how much carbon dioxide has been taken in and taken out. But if they want to ever use this for real life carbon capture then that would have to be done off of power plants and it would have to be done in flow. In the end we managed to make a flow system that flowed a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen over the capacitor and we could see when they charged and discharged it.
Could you now tell me a bit about your PhD?
My PhD is quite broad. I'm part of Jenny Zhang’s group in the chemistry department and Akshay Rao’s in physics. And my main focus is on rewiring photosynthesis.
What is photosynthesis?
Photosynthesis is the process by which plants and algae and, in my case, cyanobacteria, produce oxygen and sugars from water and carbon dioxide, entirely fuelled by light energy. The word photosynthesis literally means synthesis by light! They take light energy and they use it to excite electrons from water, and transfer them to fix carbon via some of the most beautifully complex machinery in the natural world.
Not only this, but this process also pumps protons across membranes. And the fact that all of energy and life on Earth is based on proton gradients across membranes is very wild and very cool! These proton gradients actually help my third favourite protein in the world, ATP synthase, make ATP (adenosine triphosphate)! These proteins are essentially like little wheels in membranes. If there's a proton gradient, then the protons will flow through this little wheel. And they can turn ADP, which is adenosine diphosphate, back into ATP. So, they add another phosphate! This is amazing because a lot of our energy that helps us move and think and do anything comes from that last phosphate group in ATP being cleaved off to make ADP.
So ATP synthase is your third favourite protein. What's your first and second?
My second favourite proteins are dyneins and kinesins. Whenever cells take things in from the outside, they often take them in via lipid vesicles. And then these lipid vesicles need to be transported across the cells to wherever they need to be! So these proteins attach onto those lipid vesicles and then they literally walk, like, they have legs! They go and they walk along microtubial highways inside your cells and drag vesicles back and forth. Dyneins walk one way, kinesins the other.
My first favourite protein at the moment is a light harvesting complex in dinoflagellates. Most light harvesting complexes are stuck in membranes or stuck on top of photosystems, which is close to where photosynthesis is actually happening. But in this case, the light harvesting complex is in solution in the cell, really far away from where the rest of photosynthesis happens. When light hits it, this protein makes an excited state which has to last for as long as it takes to diffuse to the membrane. And it's a reasonably simple protein and it’s literally just these two chlorophylls that are making this long-lasting excited state, and we don’t really know the specifics of what’s going on!
Sounds like you know your proteins! Let’s get back to the PhD. Can you tell me a bit about some of the experiments you do or what it's like kind of the day in the life of a biophysics PhD?
What we work on in Jenny's lab is biophotovoltaic devices, which generate electricity from photosynthesising cells. We mainly use electrochemistry to study these systems because it's a super powerful technique for doing this kind of thing. So effectively, you've got cells on electrodes, you hold them at a certain potential and you shine light on them. When you shine this light, you’re going to get a current out of them. We’re trying to figure out how they do this, and how we can use mediator molecules to steal electrons from photosynthesis to either boost the currents or do other exciting things! I’m using a combination of electrochemistry and ultrafast spectroscopy to study this across a bunch of different timescales! I actually painted my research for a NanoDTC exhibition earlier this year 😊
Why did you decide to join this group for your PhD?
I was really drawn to is this whole idea of rewiring, taking something that biology does really well and changing it for our own. I think biology is just ridiculously complicated, and especially if you're coming in as a physical scientist, even if you do have a pretty decent background in it like I do, it's incredibly complicated but also incredibly fascinating!
It's LGBTQ+ history month at the moment Robin, and I want to talk about the amazing work you're doing in chemistry department at the moment. Can you share with us all what you’ve been up to?
Of course! In the chemistry department, there hasn't ever really been anything for the LGBTQ+ community. But at the very beginning of this year, some wonderful people organised a LGBTQ+ social at the beginning of the term. And it was the first one that ever happened in the chemistry department.
At that social, they were asking people if they would be interested in building a committee of some sort to run stuff long term. And I was like, hell yes! I always wanted to do something like that as an undergraduate, but I never had the space. So we founded the Queer in Chemistry Network, which is a network of LGBTQ+ scientists and their allies in the chemistry department. And it's been brilliant. So we've been running coffee mornings, pub trips and a mentoring scheme. We also put up posters of LGBTQ+ chemists in the cafe to celebrate LGBTQ+ History Month and we're going to organize even bigger social events hopefully in the future.
This makes me so happy! It sounds amazing!
It's making me so happy too. It's really something that I wish there had been when I was an undergraduate student and we're trying to make sure that undergraduates, academic and non-academic staff feel like they can also get involved and be a part of a community.
It means a lot to me, because one of the things that really stressed me out applying for PhDs was that there was nobody like me who I could see actually doing academia. There weren't any nonbinary PhD students or anybody in my vicinity, nowhere. And I knew at the time that the only solution to that was to be the person that I needed to see. But at the time, I didn't have the capacity to do that. And I'm just so glad that that now I am able to.
And you're doing precisely that right now. What work do you hope to do in the future together as a community?
I think long term, the goal is to help inform policy around equality and diversity in the department and the university, to hopefully make the research culture a better and safer space for marginalised people. We’d love to team up with similar groups that either exist or are being formed to help achieve this.
And it's also just nice to know that people like me and everyone else in the committee exist. I think if you're for example, a white man doing science, there's so many people like you also doing science it's so easy to see people like you exist. I think a lot of the time, people don't realize quite how much that means. And at that very first social event this term, I met another nonbinary person, doing science, two years into their PhD, and wanting to set up QiCN. I finally felt like there's a community here after all that I am a part of.
Doing all this work makes me so happy, because then hopefully the people coming up from their undergraduate degree will have a community and see themselves in other people. It just makes me really, really happy, and it's definitely something I needed but didn't have.
That's so inspirational Robin, the work you're all doing is truly inspirational. Thanks for sharing all of this with us and I’ll see you soon!