• Question: What is the best thing you have discovered in your research?

    Asked by matthew on 7 Dec 2021. This question was also asked by HarryE.
    • Photo: Cobus Smit

      Cobus Smit answered on 9 Nov 2021:

      I discovered the function of an enzyme that performs a rather unique function in grapevine flowers. The enzyme makes a speliased metabolite called a sesquiterpene. These metabolites are often involved in pleasent aromas emitted by plants. For that reason you might have smelled them in perfumes, soaps and essential oils that used natural extracts.

    • Photo: Julia Spindel

      Julia Spindel answered on 26 Nov 2021:

      DNA has chemical groups added to it, one of which is called DNA methylation. This tends to switch off genes in the DNA that it is added to. When cells divide, they have to copy this DNA methylation onto the new DNA that they make. I worked on a protein that is very important in copying DNA methylation patterns onto new DNA. When cells communicate with one another, this protein gets a lot of chemical groups added to it that change how it works. I mapped all of the different chemical groups that this protein has added in different cell types, and in response to different types of communication between cells.

Comments

  • Photo: Yannick

    Yannick commented on :

    I have discovered that playing with Dry Ice is very fun :-).
    More seriously, the best thing that I have discovered is a new target of alcohol in the brain. I have discovered that alcohol can modify the activity of a protein in the brain, this modification can explain, in part, why people become addicted to alcohol. To achieve this project I have used a very cool technique that permit to control a protein with light.

  • Photo: Magdalena

    Magdalena commented on :

    Our lab discovered that the tissue that will become brain cortex in human stays immature a bit longer than the same tissue in gorilla. This immature tissue has more time to grow and that is one of the mechanisms why humans have bigger brains than other apes. You can check out the paper here:
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867421002397

  • Photo: Joaquin

    Joaquin commented on :

    I discovered that stem cells in the fly gut, which have to multiply and have half of their offspring turn into mature, specialised cells to replace the cells lost by wear and tear, use a random process (they “throw dice”) to decide which offspring cells will remain as stem cells and which ones will go on and repair the tissue. This means some of the stem cells will have both daugther cells differentiating and will not leave a stem cell behind to continue their lineage, which was against what everybody thought was the defining property of stem cells.
    Some summary and comments about our work are here:
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22580826/