Torfinn Nome

My thesis is scheduled to begin in August, but I’m already planning on starting slowly this winter. This autumn I’ve been studying mathematical statistics, molecular biology, protein chemistry, and molecular genome analysis. I’m slightly ahead of my original plan, meaning I will only apply to one course this spring (chromatography), and one intensive course next August (immunology). I need to figure out what techniques I really want to learn, and have already started reading relevant papers, including the ph.d. thesis of my supervisor Gustav Vaaje-Kolstad. His work includes a paper characterising the protein CBP21 from Serratia marcescens, a protein “opening” the structure of the tightly packed chitin, assisting the chitinase degradation. The paper was made Paper of The Week in the Journal of Biological Chemistry: “Chitinase’s Little Helper“. My plan is to work on other related proteins, see if I can find more proteins involved in similar activities. So there will be a lot of protein chemistry activity, hopefully involving scanning electron microscopy, x-ray, nmr, etc. I will also focus on the bioinformatics tools available, as I know that will come in handy.