• Question: What is your favourite experiment to do?

    Asked by anon-287319 on 17 Mar 2021. This question was also asked by anon-288219.
    • Photo: Jess Buddle

      Jess Buddle answered on 17 Mar 2021:

      Hey! I love extracting DNA from bacteria – it is quite simple to do to get the DNA out but its very satisfying at the end when it works well, then i can do loads of cool stuff with it!

    • Photo: Karen Burstow

      Karen Burstow answered on 18 Mar 2021:

      I really enjoy using different analytical techniques to work out what a piece of unknown material is, which has been found in a food or drug product. I take small subsamples to look at under the microscope to look for distinct structures, analyse the elements it’s made from and their chemical structure, to work it out. We get lots of fragments of glass, plastic and metal – and sometimes bits of hair, insects or bone!

    • Photo: Alba Park de la Torriente

      Alba Park de la Torriente answered on 23 Mar 2021:

      I work with phages, which are viruses that infect and can kill bacteria. One of the experiments that I really like is growing a bacterial strain in two different flasks, one with a phage and one with only the bacterium and no phage. With time, you start seeing the the flask with only bacteria starts getting cloudy or opaque. This is and indication the the bacteria are replicating and growing. If you compare it with the flask that has the bacteria with phage, you can see that the liquid is much clearer. Which means that the bacteria are being killed by the phages, so they are not growing. It’s cool to see this because it makes me think that this could be used in a patient with an infection and it could cure the patient.

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