• Question: What type of experiments do you do in the lab?

    Asked by axes442pan to Isabelle on 10 Nov 2021.
    • Photo: Isabelle Storer

      Isabelle Storer answered on 10 Nov 2021:

      My lab experiments consist of changing certain genes in the organism I work on, Aspergillus fumigatus. I change bits of the sequence of DNA that encodes the protein I’m interested in to see how it changes the shape of the protein. I do this so I can design drugs to target the protein and kill the cells so it can’t cause infection anymore. It may sound exciting but in reality it’s a lot of pipetting tiny amounts of various things into other tubes! I also do fluorescent live cell imaging, growth experiments and cloning often.

Comments

  • Photo: Thomas

    Thomas commented on :

    I use a variety of techniques in the lab. The most common ones are Western blot, qRT-PCR, Cell culture, seahorse extracellular flux assay and HPLC. Our experiments involve looking at immune cells derived frm bone marrow that lack a key gene for their function. Without this gene their whole function is altered and the way they control their metabolism is similarly altered. I am trying to figure out why this happens.

  • Photo: Joaquin

    Joaquin commented on :

    I like that I do very different things in the lab. Sometimes I need to cross flies from different breeds, others I assemble new DNA molecules to introduce them into their genome. I also stain their tissues and look at them in the fluorescence microscope, and try to understand the function of different proteins from the cell types that populate the tissue. Another typical experiment is to extract RNA from their cells to determine which genes are on and off under certain conditions. I also test their fitness: how well they move, how quickly they go through embryonic and larval development, how well they withstand stress (like starvation) or toxics, and how long they live.

  • Photo: Yasmin

    Yasmin commented on :

    I do a lot of cell culture in my work and I really enjoy it. Cell culture is a lab technique where you grow cells are under ‘controlled conditions’, so this means outside their natural environment. We decide on a type of cell we want to study, for me I study cardiomyocytes (heart cells), we then isolate these cells from living tissue so we can then grow them under carefully controlled conditions for future experiments.

    I just started my PhD but I will be learning a lot of new techniques which is exciting!! I will be doing fluorescent microscopy, histology (the staining of tissues with special dyes to see their structure under the microscope), echocardiography (an ultrasound scan which can show you how the heart chambers and valves are pumping blood through the heart), ECGs (a test that can be used to check the heart’s rhythm and electrical activity) and 3D cell culture (3D cell culture is a fancy, relatively new technique where cells grow and interact with their surrounding extracellular framework in three dimensions. This is different to traditional cell culture which I mentioned above, where instead cells are grown in a flat single cell layer on a plate).

  • Photo: Frank

    Frank commented on :

    We do a lot of molecular cloning, which involves PCR (amplifying specific DNA sequences), assembling DNA sequences together into vectors, and getting bacteria to make more of the DNA. The vectors we use in experiments to understand how particular genes control the development of the nervous system in chicken embryos (a very good model to give us insight into human embryonic development, since most processes are very similar). This knowledge of the molecular mechanisms is critical for our understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s, and for developing future therapies.