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My work looks at how young salmon can use daylength (also called photoperiod) to know when seasons are going to change. Atlantic salmon make long journeys or migrations from the rivers where they are born out to the big bad open ocean to feed for a couple of years before coming home to their rivers to spawn (have babies!). Before they go to the sea, the fish have to change their behaviour, their looks and their biology to help them survive. A photoperiod signal is sent to the brain of the fish, which then decides which genes are to switched on and which are to be switched off. By changing which genes are on and off, the fish can change its behaviour, looks and biology!

I spend most days working in my lab, the picture below is of my rather messy bench!
One technique I use a lot is cloning. This does not mean that I make copies of fish, just bits of their DNA! The picture shows colonies of bacteria which have bits of DNA inserted into them!

If we want to check the size of bit of DNA we have inserted, we do a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and run the product on a special gel with a marker which we can compare out samples to to find out their size.

Another thing I do a lot of is qPCR (quantitative polymerase chain reaction, eek!). All this does is look at how much a gene is expressed in different samples. The picture below shows a typical result from this method (I really just love all the colours!)