Staff spotlight
Spotlight on: Professor Hugh Nimmo
I joined the University (as Lecturer in Biochemistry) forty years ago, however since I went part-time and gave up my administrative commitments two years ago I have been doing a lot of research with my own hands, my job satisfaction has increased and I now feel much as I did as a PhD student or postdoc – concentrating hard on setting up an experiment correctly, excitement when I start analysing the data, pleasure if the experiment has worked, annoyance if it hasn’t (and curiosity as to why not).
I’ve always been interested in biological control, and this has led me through allosteric enzymology, protein phosphorylation in mammals, bacteria and plants, with a diversion into manipulation of metabolic fluxes (now called synthetic biology) to my current interests – how plants sense time and temperature. My own project involves the plant circadian clock. Some years ago we found that the machinery of the clock is somewhat different between roots and leaves; while these organs are in synchrony in a light:dark cycle , their clocks run at different speeds in constant light. Roots express most or all of the photoreceptors found in leaves – why, since roots are underground in the dark? We’ve now shown that the difference between roots and leaves lies in their light inputs. Plant issues can conduct light, acting rather like fibre optic cables, and I’ve been working on the hypothesis that roots’ sense of time comes from ‘light piping’ from shoots by this mechanism. Understanding the ramifications of the circadian clock has important long-term implications for crop improvement (for example by control of flowering time), though my project is done mainly for reasons of intellectual curiosity.
I’ve recently been awarded two grants to continue another project that has been running in the lab for several years. The circadian clock shows two, seemingly contradictory, responses to temperature changes. On the one hand the period of the clock is essentially unaffected by temperature over the range 10-30°C; on the other, the clock is very sensitive to warm/cold cycles and can be entrained by cyclic changes of only 2°C. We found that expression of some clock genes is controlled by temperature-sensitive alternative splicing that leads to the production of functional or non-functional transcripts (the latter contain premature stop codons and are turned over by nonsense-mediated decay). Analysis of a large RNA-seq experiment has led to the view that some genes respond to environmental factors such as temperature at the level of transcription only, some at the level of alternative splicing only and others at both levels.
Our work over the next three years is aimed at identifying the mechanisms, speed and significance of these changes in splicing, including the nature of the primary temperature sensor(s). The data should be highly relevant to the important topic of cold tolerance in crop species, and hence to food security.
I’ve had great fun at different levels while working in science. There are still big opportunities (as well as difficulties), provided that you keep curious as to how the world works, keep on the alert for the unusual result that may overturn your preconceptions and keep devoting some of your time to working outside your comfort zone - that can be where new ideas emerge.
My other interests include gardening (summer), knitting (winter), wildlife photography (pics below from trip to Antarctica) and running (all the time). Plans for 2017 include a visit to South Georgia and learning to weave.
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