• Question: what practiluar things do you in you lab?

    Asked by anon-186280 to Verity, Trystan, Raquel, Danny, Catherine, Andy on 11 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Danny Ward

      Danny Ward answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      I do a wide range of experiments to help understand bacterial infections better and potentially how we can stop some of these infections 👨‍🔬.
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      Experiments are different every day. Sometimes, I will be working with DNA, the genetic instructions of life. Other days I will be growing bacteria. I also do a lot of work with plants and also carry out many biochemical reactions. My days are very varied. Ultimately, I will be carrying out these experiments to move me ever so slightly closer to understanding bacterial infection better.
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      Some examples experiments include the following:
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      – Infecting a model plant organism to understand how bacteria are able to infect
      – Making specific changes to bacteria to stop them being able to infect so well
      – Purifying little parts of the bacteria that they use to infect their targets so I can carry out reactions with them to see how these parts work
      – Looking at the bacterial genome. This is all of its genetic information which tells it how to do stuff…like how to infect things.
      – Working out the structure and shape of little bits of the bacteria responsible for infection
      – Working out what biochemical reactions take place in the bacteria to control and regulate bacterial infection

    • Photo: Verity Hill

      Verity Hill answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      I don’t actually do any research in a lab! I use genetic information that was collected by other people to rerun the ebola epidemic in West Africa to try and understand what happened.
      There are signatures of transmission between people in the genetic information of the virus, and it’s this that helps me to work out where the virus was! So my day to day is gathering information about public health, and then coding up the simulation in different ways.

    • Photo: Trystan Leng

      Trystan Leng answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      My lab is actually my computer! The experiments I run are known as ‘simulations’. In my research, I write computer code for things called ‘mathematical models’ – these are simplified versions of disease spread. By changing people’s behaviour in this simplified model, things like how quickly people form partnerships, we can see how this affects the spread of disease. By doing so, we can begin to understand how these things affect the spread of disease in the real world!

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