Caitlin Reid

Caitlin is a third-year Ph.D. student and Research Technician in the Earnshaw Lab.

She joined in May 2019 as a Summer intern and, following this, began her role as full-time Research Technician – mostly working with Dr. Kumiko Samejima. In March 2021, Caitlin started working on her Ph.D. within the lab alongside her Technician role, and aims to complete her Ph.D. by the end of 2025.

Before joining us, she completed a BSc in Applied Biomedical Science at Glasgow Caledonian University. During her undergraduate studies, Caitlin worked at NHS Scotland in histopathology and microbiology – fulfilling her traineeship with the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS). In her final year she achieved a first-class Honours project studying disease-associated point mutations in Gap junction beta-2 protein (Connexin 26), and discovered her love for research.

During her internship in our lab, Caitlin studied the distribution of chromosome periphery proteins whilst learning the fundamentals of cell culture and microscopy.

Following on from this introduction into the lab, she spent the next 18 months as a full-time research technician – working closely with Dr Kumiko Samejima and Dr Elisa Pesenti. During this time, Caitlin has established several cell lines utilising the auxin-inducible degron system (AID, Kanemaki et al. 2009 and 2020) whilst supporting the general running of the lab and continuing to expand her repertoire of methodology (flow cytometry, biochemistry, proteomics). Caitlin contributed to Elisa’s 2020 paper published in ACS Synthetic Biology titled ‘Analysis of Complex DNA Rearrangements during Early Stages of HAC Formation’ – in particular with microscopy analysis and imaging, fiber-FISH experiments and cloning. She also optimised a protocol for cyto-spinning chromosome spreads of HeLa CDK1as cells, which she used to produce figure 6 of ‘The intrinsically disorderly story of Ki-67’, published in Open Biology (Remnant et al. 2021).

In March 2021, Caitlin started her Ph.D. with Bill. Her work falls into two main projects: 3D chromosome organisation, and dynamic chromatin proteomics. Utilising the CDK1as system to establish near-perfect synchronous metaphase cultures, she is using sequencing-based methods and microscopy to study DNA organisation in metaphase chromosomes. In parallel, Caitlin established a streamlined protocol for studying changes in the chromatin proteome during synchronous mitotic entry – a follow-on from Dr. Itaru Samejima’s 2022 Mito-ChEP paper. Caitlin continues to support the running of the lab as Technician.