• Question: have you discovered more in your research lately

    Asked by zainab5445 to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 21 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by acmh28, blairpeters, lakishan16, andrei.
    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      As I said somewhere else, in April we discovered that HCV uses one of the immune system chemicals which is supposed to protect you against infection as a trigger for it’s entry into target cells. Yet another trick the virus pulls to get past the immune system!
      In my lectures I put up the classic three word definition of a virus one word at a time (and get the students to chant it out) :
      “OBLIGATE – INTRACELLULAR – PARASITE”
      I then put up this and get them to chant it too :
      ” DEVIOUS – LITTLE – B******S”
      Always makes them laugh (and think).

    • Photo: Ruth Mitchell

      Ruth Mitchell answered on 23 Jun 2013:

      My last discovery is that the molecule I’m working on (interleukin-4) is working through a cell type (dendritic cells) which we didn’t think was happening! So the question now is how…?

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      I had hoped to discover something more yesterday, but sadly my experiment didn’t work 🙁 Sigh.

      On the bright side, I discovered that 1 regulatory cell can’t stop 5 killer cells from killing! I’ll have to put more regulatory cells in there next time. Does this count? 🙂

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Nothing new since I wrote my profile on here, but I am hopefully on the verge of finding out more. At the moment I am analysing a huge amount of DNA sequences from different animals to see which retroviruses they seem to have been infected with. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to look at the output and see if there is anything interesting in there.

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      The last thing I discovered was that my experiment hadn’t worked! This happens a lot, but as a scientist you have to try, try and try again!

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