• Question: what kind of work do your particular scientific subjects intail ? -Taite Young and Haley Northcott

    Asked by mrtaite to Carla, Madgie, Nick, Vicky, Werner on 11 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Marlene Lorgen

      Marlene Lorgen answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      My current work involves a lot of lab work. This include extracting DNA and RNA from samples, using a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to increase the amount of DNA available and looking at how the amount of RNA changes in animals kept under different conditions using quantitative PCR (qPCR). This lets us know if genes are switched on or off under different conditions. I also do a lot of cloning, which involved taking bits of DNA and inserting them into bacterial DNA rings called plasmids. I then grow the bacteria to make lots of copies of the DNA and then sequence it to look at the DNA sequence.

    • Photo: Nick Groves-Kirkby

      Nick Groves-Kirkby answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      My work with genetics involves lots of different types of work.

      First, there is lots of lab work to create data. I tend to let other people do this for me, and I currently have colleagues in Israel and Holland who send me their results. I try to stay friendly with them, and make trips to see them occasionally.

      Genetics generates huge amounts of data, and I spend a lot of my time analysing this to try to make sense of it. I use some fancy maths, and write computer programs to try to find interesting things in the data. At the end of all this, I make pictures or graphs that show what I’ve found as clearly as possible.

      I also spend a lot of time reading and thinking to try to make sense of what I find. We have more data about people’s genes than we ever have before, and no-one really knows how best to use it. I try to think about these kind of questions, and sometimes write articles about them.

    • Photo: Werner Muller

      Werner Muller answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      We are working on visualising inflammation. For this we label proteins that are signalling part of inflammation and we can then follow the proteins under the microscope.

    • Photo: Vicky Forster

      Vicky Forster answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Hello mrtaite,

      Good question – some of the work that I do is similar to what Marlene has described in her answer below. At the moment I am spending a lot of time using a machine called a flow cytometer. This sounds complicated but really isn’t. What a flow cytometer can do is look at individual cells and tell me more about them. I put in a tube of cells – maybe blood cells from a leukaemia patient, and then the machine sucks them in at a rate of about 500 per second! It can then tell me how big they are and how much DNA they have in them (lots of leukaemia cells have too much, or too little DNA in them, which causes the leukaemia). I can also use clever things called antibodies which stick to proteins on a cell surface – and then they glow different colours if the protein is there. if there is lots of a certain type of protein we are trying to detect, the antibodies will make the cells glow really brightly, and the flow cytometer can detect this and show me on a graph. All of this information is really important in telling us more about cancer cells.

Comments