As well as helping out with our ‘blog a day’ during MND Awareness Month, we also asked our researchers to get involved in ‘baking’ to become our first ‘MND Researchers Bake off Champion’. We received some great science-themed cakes, from zebrafish biscuits to a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance(NMR) machine cake!
Our Director of Research, Dr Brain Dickie said: “It was really tough to judge, they were all great entries! (might need to taste next year though…!). Of the seven entrants there was one that I think wins by a short head, scoring on appearance, originality and relevance to MND research, with an extra mark for sheer wackiness – the ribosome translating a C9orf72 repeat expansion cake!”
The winning cake was by Jenn Dodd, a PhD student at the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN)! Here Jenn describes her cake and how it feels to be the MND Researchers Bake off Champion!
The winner’s speech:
I decided to bake the cake, as at SITraN we have a weekly cake club and it was my turn to bake in June. I thought entering the competition would be a good way to get involved in MND awareness month and thought it would make cake club a bit different!
Small structural units called cells make up the human body. They convert food and oxygen into energy to produce chemically reactive machines and building blocks called proteins. There are thousands of different proteins made and so special templates called RNA are sent to a protein-making factory in cells called the ribosome. The ribosome makes proteins from the RNA templates in a process called translation (Read more about how cells make proteins here).
The cake shows a ribosome (yellow) translating RNA (the stripey sweets) to make a protein (the flying saucer chains). The protein that is being made is C9ORF72, a protein with an unknown function that is involved in some cases of MND.
I’d like to say thank you and I am really pleased to have won the bake off with my cake experiment!
