Saba Alhagagi
MBio student (2023-24)/ PhD student (2024-)
About Me
I am studying an Integrated Master’s (MBio) in Biomedical Science at the University of Warwick. I joined the Holden lab in October 2023.
I completed my 3rd year dissertation project in Professor Yin Chen's lab, exploring how pathogenic bacteria, specifically Burkholderia cenocepacia, can remodel their lipid and membrane compositions in response to phosphate limitation.
I've also worked on various clinical microbiology projects, including studying microbe-microbe interactions in Cystic Fibrosis (Whelan Lab @ Nottingham), and characterising division of labour phenotypes in pathogenic fungi (Tsai Lab @ Birmingham).
I am studying an Integrated Master’s (MBio) in Biomedical Science at the University of Warwick. I joined the Holden lab in October 2023.
I completed my 3rd year dissertation project in Professor Yin Chen's lab, exploring how pathogenic bacteria, specifically Burkholderia cenocepacia, can remodel their lipid and membrane compositions in response to phosphate limitation.
I've also worked on various clinical microbiology projects, including studying microbe-microbe interactions in Cystic Fibrosis (Whelan Lab @ Nottingham), and characterising division of labour phenotypes in pathogenic fungi (Tsai Lab @ Birmingham).
Current Research Our lab studies how bacteria grow and divide, but understanding how the protein complexes involved in these processes are organised can be challenging due to their dynamic and mobile nature.
Chemical fixation, in principle, preserves cells to be comparable to their original living state and allows us to take a “snapshot” of what these proteins look like. Using aldehyde-based fixatives such as paraformaldehyde and gluteraldehyde to covalently bind amino acid residues together, a matrix of cross-linked proteins and DNA is formed to stabilise cellular structures. However, we know that aldehydes are documented disruptors of native ultrastructure in prokaryotic and eukaryotic systems, introducing artifacts that lead to interpretations typically not observed during live-cell imaging.
My current research focuses on the development of a new fixation method for reliable bacterial super-resolution microscopy, and I'm using SIM and SMLM techniques, such as STORM, to validate this.