• Question: what's the best thing you have discovered

    Asked by Owen to Christie, Dan, David, Dawn, Sian on 14 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by Joe Mitchell :), #the-mad-scientist.
    • Photo: Dawn Lau

      Dawn Lau answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      I’m only early into my career, so I hope the best discoveries are yet to come! In my PhD I discovered a potential binding site between two proteins in the brain, one of which is known to have an important role in Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. This may be useful knowledge in the future when designing drugs to target the interaction between these two proteins in Alzheimer’s disease.

    • Photo: Christie Waddington

      Christie Waddington answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      In terms of my project? I discovered that the protein I’m looking at is actually a completely different size to what we thought it was! This is good news, because we can now think up new hypotheses as to what it does. Up to now, we thought it was a really small protein and we were having problems working with it. This has made my project a lot easier!

      This protein is interesting because if we have too much of it, then the DNA isn’t read properly and if we have too little of it in the cell then the cells die. My project is working out what it does in the cell.

    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      Probably the most useful was in some research to investigate people’s knowledge, attitude and reported behaviour in relation to food. Some secondary analysis done by my team and researchers at NatCen was that income and educational status are not linked to reported behaviors, but who you live with, your gender and whether you have siblings is! We now use this information to target food standards agency messaging.

Comments