Question: what is the worst thing about your work? how do you change the plants cells?

Carla Turner answered on 11 Nov 2013:

The worst thing about my work is that it takes a long time to grown plants to experiment on.

Changing the cells is quite complicated. I will try and explain, sorry if I don’t make it clear enough! It is also different for different crops. The way we do it as a scientist is easy, but not how you would do it if you were growing crops to eat.

There is a bacteria that infects plants. When it infects the plant it injects it’s DNA into the plant. We can take this bacteria and remove its genes and put the genes we want into it. We then let the bacteria inject them into the plant.

Sorry it is very complicated!