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

    Asked by matthew to Thomas on 9 Nov 2021.
    • Photo: Thomas Nicol

      Thomas Nicol answered on 9 Nov 2021:

      It’s really subjective. But my personal opinion is the work I did during my PhD. I discovered a new fragment of a protein that appears only in certain cells and appears to be responsible for some of the differences in metabolism between different cell types. I think its really interesting and could tell us a lot about what to look for in other proteins and cell types.

Comments

  • Photo: Craig

    Craig commented on :

    I’ve been lucky enough to find out a couple of important things. Hopefully I learn lots more!

    1) I contributed to a big group effort that discovered how DNA damage from things like cigarette smoke is inherited by cells as they divide. This is important for understanding how cancer develops.

    3) I led research into understanding how a moth that eats our crops all over the world had made it into South America. Once we found that out, we could start planning how to manage the insect so it didn’t impact food supplies as badly.

  • Photo: Frank

    Frank commented on :

    During my undergraduate studies I learned about Hox genes, a fascinating family of genes that tell cells where they are in the body – very important in embryonic development. In my PhD, I was lucky enough to contribute to our understanding how the Hox genes evolved in the animal kingdom.

  • Photo: Frankie

    Frankie commented on :

    I did my masters on a group of very rare genetic disorders, where the patients had been having tests for many years to try and find a diagnosis but still didn’t know what was causing their disease (we sometimes call this a diagnostic odyssey). It wasn’t really a discovery, but for a couple of the families I was able to find a genetic variant that was causing their disease. I found it really fulfilling to know that my work enabled them to get an answer after so many years.

  • Photo: Becky

    Becky commented on :

    There have been a couple of highlights for me – when I was doing my masters, I worked in a research group that were turning skin cells into brain cells and then growing them for over a year in a dish. They discovered that when they did this, the cells started acting like more mature brain cells and expressing different proteins. Then when I was doing my own PhD research, I discovered a new function of a protein called C9orf72, which is involved in the development of neurological diseases. It’s exciting to think that this could eventually open up new avenues of research into treatment of these diseases in the future.