• Question: What is the most interesting experiment you have done

    Asked by CMSPACE to Christie, Dan, David, Dawn, Sian on 16 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by Caitlin, Jess.
    • Photo: Dawn Lau

      Dawn Lau answered on 16 Jun 2016:

      The most interesting experiment for me was to see whether electrical activity could cause brain cells to secrete a protein which is involved in Alzheimer’s disease. Brain cells use electrical signals to communicate all the time, but at the time it was not known whether they could also signal the release of this protein from one cell to another. I made brain slices and let them develop on a plate for four weeks (that was to let them “settle down” after removing the brain from the animal, and to let them grow connections between the brain cells). Then I used chemicals to simulate electrical activity on the brain slices. I then collected the medium that was used to bathe the brain slices, then used a technique called a sandwich ELISA to detect whether the slices had released any of that particular protein into the media. It was a pretty cool experiment because lots of other scientists in the field were also wondering how this protein could be released from one cell to another!

    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 18 Jun 2016:

      Probably a survey of toxic substances in bottled water. I did this when I first started working at the food standards Agency and out of the almost 200 bottles of water I found 3 that were over the limits.
      It was interesting because as part of publishing the results I was responsible for contacting the producers and telling them that they were over the limits.

    • Photo: Christie Waddington

      Christie Waddington answered on 19 Jun 2016:

      My most interesting experiment involved stopping the DNA being read in live cells, harvesting them, and seeing where most of the proteins were on the DNA. DNA is read by a group of proteins called the ribosome. If there are parts of the DNA that have more ribosomes on them when we stop them reading DNA, it may be an interesting sequence that isn’t a gene. We haven’t identified all of these yet! It’s a very long experiment that takes around 2 weeks, and you have to be super careful as your sample could degrade really easily! We have to work at 4oC for most of the time, and that’s really cold if you’re doing it for a number of hours!

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