Mirana Ramialison (France)
| Hello my name is Mirana! I have just finished my PhD at EMBL.
Being born in an island, Madagascar, having grown up in another island, Martinique, somehow it must have been my fate to work with ...fish. And my fish of choice is Medaka, a small freshwater fish from yet another island - Japan. |
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Although Japanese rice fields and rivers are crowded with Medaka, the Japanese don't eat them. Not because it's too small for a sushi (2 cm on average), but because it can save lives.
The research team from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory that I am part of is studying Medaka (a.k.a "the-small-fish-with-big-eyes" in Japanese) to understand how an eye forms. Since Medaka eyes are similar to the human ones, we can have a better understanding of human eye diseases resulting from malformations. When you look at Medaka transparent eggs under the microscope, you can see the eye developing "live".
My PhD work is not restricted to the eye only, but aims to understand which genes are essential for the formation of all organs (eye, brain, ears etc.). Therefore I went to Kyoto to collect information about Medaka genes (more than 20 000). It is impossible to study all these genes at once, for it can take a whole career to study the function of just one of them.
Mirana Ramialison |
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Luckily before the PhD, I graduated from an engineering school where I learnt bioinformatics techniques that allow the analysis of thousands of genes at a time. During high school, I enjoyed biology and mathematics a lot, and bioinformatics is somewhere in between these two fields. Now my work consists, first, in writing computer programmes to predict the function of Medaka genes and second, in doing experiments to validate if the predictions of my programmes are correct or if they tell me complete nonsense (which is most often the case, I have to admit, and that's why a PhD always takes more than 3 years!!!).
Still, these years go by very quickly since we have to travel a lot. In this field you have to go abroad to advertise your work and to be aware of the work from others as well. During my PhD, I enjoyed attending conferences in Italy, the UK, the USA, and Japan. But I have to admit that back in Germany, where the winters are not exactly warm, I am very happy to see my little Medaka again, which are happily swimming in aquariums where the water temperature is 25°C... tropical...
But when I am not in the fishroom or at my computer, I practice Japanese and I also take German courses. I enjoy cooking different type of food (Malagasy and Creole for instance) but most of all, I love dancing hip-hop, salsa and zouk, typical music from the French Caribbean.
Schools:
Collège Tartenson Fort de France
Lycée Victor Schoelcher Fort de France