• Question: what is the most biggest experiment youve done..... EVER

    Asked by nortonfudge to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 20 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by somerlilyblakey.
    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Hmm…I’m not sure how to measure how big an experiment is! Sometimes an experiment has hundreds and hundreds of samples and takes weeks to run, but only gives you a little bit of information. Some experiments have very few samples, maybe a dozen or so, but give you lots of information. So it depends what you want to call a big experiment!

      I think what I call a big experiment is one that takes a long time to do. Once I did an experiment where I had to take cells out of a mouse on day 1, grow them in a dish, then separate them into 216 samples to which I then added different amounts of drugs and tumour cells, to see if the different drugs made the cells better or worse at killing tumours. I had to prepare those 216 samples on days 7, 9, 11 and 13 – and that took 5 hours each day to prepare! On days 8, 10, 12 and 14, I would take those 216 samples and look at them on a machine, to see how many tumour cells were left – it took about 3 or 4 hours to do that many samples each time. From the start of the experiment (day 1) until the end (day 14) it was 2 weeks, and I had looked at a total of 864 samples.

      Needless to say, I was completely exhausted by the end of it! But it gave me good results, so I was happy 🙂

    • Photo: Ruth Mitchell

      Ruth Mitchell answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      My longest experiment would be treating mice 2 times a week for 3 weeks taking between 2-4 hours to treat them, then adding in a 16 hour day where I treated the mice in the morning, took their spleen and processed them into 3 different assays!! That was long!!!

      My most expensive one takes a day to run and you can look at 96 samples giving a read out of 9 colours (different cytokines) for each sample! That’s a lot of data!

    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      In 1988, Pete Simmonds (look him up) and I were so stupid as to try and PCR amplify DNA from a single molecule of HIV-1 – and it worked!

      That’s still the biggest pure science breakthrough I’ve ever made. It’s now spawned a multimillion pound industry called “digital PCR”. I feel very smug thinking we did it first.

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      The biggest experiment I’ve done was a computer based experiment. First, I took the whole DNA sequences from 30 animals – about 80,000,000,000 letters! Then I took the sequences of about 7,000 sections of retroviruses. I used a program which takes the virus sequences and looks at all the animal DNA to see which parts are most similar – this gave me 200,000 pieces of virus-like animal DNA to sort through. I’m still sorting through it!

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      @nortonfudge- hmmm, I dont know about the biggest, but the longest experiment I did lasted over a year! The thing is, when you are working with bacteria that live in water, they don’t grow very quickly at first, because its cold, and there is not much food.

      Also, because you want your experiment to be as much like ‘real life’ as possible, the longer you leave it the better. However, it didn’t give me great results and so I won’t be running that one again in a hurry…

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