• Question: What kind of experiments do you do and what equipment do you use?

    Asked by to Amy, Anita, Daryl, Nimesh, Sandra on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Anita Thomas

      Anita Thomas answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I’m working on about 6 projects at the moment. One is trying to establish whether a certain sort of blood cell called a T-lymphocyte is necessary to make another sort of cell (a macrophage) follow a particular pathway, so it becomes activated. I need to know this. If I can prevent or reverse macrophage activation, then this may give me the key to reversing or preventing atherosclerosis (and reverse/prevent arteries from blocking). Yesterday I used a piece of kit that measures the numbers of fluorescently-labelled beads as they flow past a sensor. This enables me to quantify the amount of chemicals in the samples that I’m looking at. It has taken me over 4 years to collect all of my samples.

      Hope that this helps,
      Anita.

    • Photo: Sandra Chiwanza

      Sandra Chiwanza answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I work in Microbiology where we are looking for bacteria and yeast that cause different kinds of diseases. So, most of my experiments involve culturing patient samples, which range from sputum, urine and stool cultures.
      Culturing means taking a sample and growing it on agar overnight or up to a week in an incubator.The agar acts like food for the bacteria present in the samples above and allow them to grow and multiply and become visible to the naked eye. You get different shapes, colours, textures of bacteria and yeast and this is what we look for after incubation. I then run a sample on a machine called the Vitek2 which identifies what type of bacteria it is and tell me which antibiotics are best suited to successfully treat an infection if present.

    • Photo: Amy Monaghan

      Amy Monaghan answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Hi Mashpotato

      I do lots of cell based experiments looking at how certain proteins important for hormone action are affected by drugs. There’s too many to explain in detail but I’ll tell you about a few here.

      I use cloning to add new genes into my cells and examine their effects. For this I use PCR (polymerase chain reaction) which basically copies the DNA that I need to make my gene thousands of times. I can then “cut and stick” my new gene into the cells using different enzymes. To check I have the right DNA sequence we use a technique called Sanger sequencing which means different colour dyes are released depending on which DNA base is present. There’s a video that tells you more about that here:

      Once the cells contain my new genes I can measure how well they are working using a “luciferase” experiment. Luciferin is the chemical that makes fireflies glow in the dark, and if I add the luciferase gene to my cells with a special DNA sequence they will glow when my hormone receptor protein is made.

      I can also measure how much of my protein is made using a Western blot. This is a special gel that can separate proteins by size. I can then detect them by exposing them on X-ray film in the dark, like photographers used to do.

      I hope this gives you some idea of what I do. If you have more questions about anything I’ve said please just ask me!

      Amy

    • Photo: Daryl Jones

      Daryl Jones answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      At the moment I’m working on experiments with mice. I am looking at the mouse brains to see how Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease spreads throughout the brain. We use all kinds of equipment, including mouse treadmills and swimming pools! We also use antibodies that we use to stain the brains- kind of like a paint that sticks to diseased parts of the brain so that we can see it!

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