About Gideon

Dr Gideon Dunster is a project manger at the Allen Institute for Cell Science in Seattle. As a project manager, Gideon works with all kinds of different teams to help accomplish the goals of the Institute more smoothly and efficiently. Growing up in northeastern Ohio, Gideon was very active: he played sports, he sang and played in the orchestra, he was on the Science Olympiad team, and was in the school plays and musicals. When he went to college, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do so he spent the first two years taking classes in everything from Theater and Philosophy to French and Psychology. Eventually he decided that he really wanted to be a Biology professor, so he began working towards graduate school. After spending time in a post-doctoral position, he realized that while he loved doing research and teaching, he wanted to work in a big team environment where he could help others work on big, unique scientific questions. When Gideon’s not working, he likes biking, reading, and spending time with friends.

Every one of us is made up of trillions of individual cells, all precisely organized and each with a specific job to keep us healthy. However, every one of us also began as a single, special kind of cell that divided over and over and over to grow into tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions of cells! This process is not random. In fact, these cells divide and organize into 3D shapes over the course of several months, precisely making up the building blocks that make you who you are today. How do cells do this? How do they grow and divide and communicate in a way that allows them to so carefully create these very complex 3D structures? These are the kinds of questions that the team at the Allen Institute is asking, of which Gideon is a team member.

At the Allen Institute, scientists use a special kind of cell called a human stem cell which has been modified to glow under a microscope. Stem cells are just cells that have the ability to turn into different types of cells in the body. Think about a muscle cell in your arm compared to a neuron in your brain. These two cells share the same DNA (the code that makes up who we are) but they look completely different and perform different jobs in your body. Under the right conditions, a stem cell can turn into either of these kinds of specialty cells. This makes them really great for doing this kind of research, because they have the potential to become anything in the body.

Once Gideon and his team have these cells, they use a fancy kind of molecular "scissors" called CRISPR to cut the DNA and insert the ability to make a fluorescent protein called "green fluorescent protein, or GFP, into the cells’ DNA. Now, whenever that cell expresses that part of the DNA, the resulting protein will glow making it easier to see. They put these cells under a microscope for several days to watch them as they grow and divide. Sometimes they leave them alone and watch what they do normally, sometimes they add things to the cell’s environment to watch how they react, and sometimes they even turn them into a specialty cell and observe how they change!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but at the Allen Institute a microscope video is worth a thousand numbers! Once they have the videos of their cells from the microscopes, their team begins calculating all kinds of information about each and every cell: how big it is, how old it is, how it grows, when it divides, and on and on and on. These numbers make up the huge datasets that we can use to address those questions from the beginning: how do cells build complex 3D shapes, and ultimately, us?