• Question: whats your favourite ever experiment

    Asked by berik lad to Steven, Oli, Jenny, Hannah, Eleni on 4 Nov 2016. This question was also asked by Lewis -T-.
    • Photo: Oliver Charity

      Oliver Charity answered on 4 Nov 2016:

      Hi,

      My favourite ever experiment is probably biofilm experiments. Biofilms are tiny little communities made by bacteria, with dead bacteria on the outside and living ones in the middle. They all work together to ensure survival of their little community, and viewing how these are made and how they can survive is amazing! Biofilms are a reason some bacteria can evade antibiotic treatment, so doing these experiments could help out in treating nasty bacterial infections (and they are really fun to do!).

      Oli

    • Photo: Jenny Batson

      Jenny Batson answered on 4 Nov 2016:

      My favourite ever experiment was one that I set up during my PhD based on an idea I had through talking to other scientists at a meeting. It involved injecting cancer cells into a gel to form a sphere and then imaging how the cancer cells moved in and out of the sphere and how they interacted with normal cells. It was cool because I didn’t know if it would work and I was testing a new approach and it did work and is now published! It showed that cancer cells are repelled from one another more and move further away from the spheroid if they have high levels of receptor proteins called EphA2 and EphA4, which could be a way that cancer cells metastasise to distant sites in the body. These receptors could be targets for novel anti-cancer drugs although a lot more work is needed.

    • Photo: Steven Street

      Steven Street answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      Hi 634drug24,

      I have a few favourite experiments. My favourite is probably when I test the compounds that I’ve been making against the panel of cancer cell lines that we have. It’s exciting because i get to see if the new compounds do anything and if all my hard work has pain off!

      I also quite enjoy doing the reactions to make the compounds that I’m testing. One involves putting spoonfuls of sugar into boiling acetic anhydride, watching it dissolve then pouring it into water to make it precipitate, and then recrystallising all 100 odd grams!

      Steve

    • Photo: Steven Street

      Steven Street answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      duplicate

    • Photo: Hannah Bolt

      Hannah Bolt answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      Hi 634drug24,

      My favorite experiment in the work I do is something called confocal fluorescent microscopy. In these experiments I attach a colored dye to my drug molecules and then I add the drug molecules to cells. This allows me to look down a microscope and see where the drug molecules go in the cell. This is really useful as it gives me an idea of how the drugs work, how toxic the drugs might be to human cells and the pictures are all pretty cool too! You can see the cells and lots of bright colours (either green, yellow or red) where the drug molecules travel to in the cells.

      Hannah

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