The last REAL experiment I did (that is, not a computer simulated one) was taking ultrasound pictures of a the slow compression of a gelatine block which was intended to mimick a stiff tumour in soft background tissue. The data was… pretty good. Hopefully good enough to publish!
My next experiment will be in the breast clinic in the Royal Marsden – although it’s not really an experiment as such, just collecting lots of clinical ultrasound data for analysis.
I have infected cells on a petri dish and after leaving the virus multiplying in the cells for a specific time, I have collected the cells and then extracted the proteins. I have then analysed the proteins with a technique that is called western blot, to see if after infection the expression of certain proteins was altered.
I don’t really do experiments as such, but the last thing I did at work was to peer-review an article for a journal. When we write articles about our research and send them to journals they are usually sent out to other scientist who work on similar things (our peers) to review and comment on.
Papers only get published in good journals if other scientists have looked at them and think that they are good and that what you have done was done correctly and was important.
My latest experiment was this: I’m trying to find out more about two proteins that can bind to each other in cells, and this binding seems to be important for cells to die. I have a theory that a third protein might stop the first two binding to each other. So to check this out I mixed the three proteins together to see what happens. It sounds pretty boring, but it’s very important, honest!
Unfortunately the experiment didn’t work so I have to try it again next week…
Comments
sciencetube145 commented on :
Thanks Gioia and Leo, that’s cool stuff. I hope your experiments go according to plan.
Celine xxx
blondes commented on :
Cool, sounds interesting 😉 x