Professor honoured

Professor of developmental biology, Cheryll Tickle, was one of the five female professors to have been named on this year's Royal Society of Edinburgh's (RSE) list of newly elected fellows.

To be elected a fellow to the RSE is an honour bestowed upon the likes of Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin to name but two. To be a female in the male dominated world of science and still find yourself on the list of newly elected fellows is a feat in itself. This year five fellowships out of 44 were awarded to women by the RSE.

Professor Cheryll Tickle: "It is a great honour for me to receive a fellowship from the RSE - particularly because although I have been working in Scotland as an academic for only just over a year, I started my research career in Scotland and did my PhD in Glasgow. It is also excellent that more and more women scientists are being recognised for their work. The anatomy and physiology department in Dundee already has another woman RSE fellow, Professor Birgit Lane. This recognition is certainly important for the increasing number of younger women just starting their careers in science."

The RSE, an organisation that "promotes the advancement of learning", elects fellows that undertake a diverse range of activities "that will sustain the excellence and usefulness of the Scottish research base". Professor Tickle and her team at the University of Dundee carry out the kind of research that attempts to answer questions from the public such as: "How did Thalidomide cause such limb defects?"; "Why are there apparent clusters of limb defects around some coastal areas?" and "How does the foetus when forming in the womb know to produce a thumb on the hand and a big toe on the foot?"

These questions and many more all form the area of research referred to as developmental biology - where scientists examine what starts off in the foetus as a mound of identical cells and explore what tells particular cells to develop into bone for example, and other cells to develop into muscle - and in the "right" place. Two in 1,000 live births will be children with some form of limb defect and in many cases nobody knows why or how this could have happened.

With her research Professor Tickle has been able to start slowly answering some of the whys and hows. In parallel with the progress of clinical genetics, developmental biology has enabled newly identified genes to be causally linked to specific limb defects. For example, a single gene has been identified responsible for causing a condition known as Greig cephalosyndactyly (an inherited disorder characterised by physical abnormalities to the fingers, toes, head and face). As more and more genes are identified and the knowledge from developmental biology research expands more and more clinical conditions of limb defects can start to be understood.

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