• Question: Whats your favourite type of experiment?

    Asked by maddy12 to Jack, Jon, Tom, Yalda on 19 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Jack Heal

      Jack Heal answered on 19 Mar 2013:

      An experiment I’m doing at the moment uses something called NMR (“nuclear magnetic resonance”). It’s the same technology they use in MRI scanners in hospitals when they get pictures of the inside of someone’s body. It uses really big magnets which have to be cooled by liquid helium (VERY cold – about -270 degrees celcius. The coldest it’s possible to get is -273 degrees, which is called “absolute zero”). When the magnets are really cold they become super strong magnets.
      I used NMR to look at proteins. By playing around with the magnets you can make the molecules vibrate in different ways and by doing this you can build up a picture of what the protein looks like. Which is pretty amazing. You can “watch” how the protein moves around and interacts with other things. It’s a cool experiment, and it’s run on some pretty huge equipment which costs millions of pounds.

    • Photo: Yalda Javadi

      Yalda Javadi answered on 19 Mar 2013:

      My favourite experiment is called atomic force microscopy (sometimes called AFM), which is when you use force to pull apart a single protein to measure how strong it is. You basically attach one end of a protein to a gold surface and the other end to a tiny tip, which is used to pull the protein apart. It’s so cool because you just look at one protein at a time…which makes the results super accurate!

    • Photo: Tom Branson

      Tom Branson answered on 19 Mar 2013:

      My favourite thing to do is design new proteins. You have to write the “code” for it in DNA on a computer and then tell a compmay to make it for you. They then send you the DNA parts which you have to stick together to make the whole “gene”. This gene you then put into some bacteria, grow the bacteria and they produce the protein for you like little factories.

      So at the end from your original design, you have a new protein to play with.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 19 Mar 2013:

      I don’t do experiments anymore but when I did, it was ones where I got to watch little fish and try to figure out why they behaved in the way they did. It was like being in a nature documentary in my own lab!

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