• Question: what is your favourite experiment ?

    Asked by 2192 ATC all the way to Priya, Andy, Natt, Tatiana on 15 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by ben.holmes, new holland craig, !!!!!!!!!!>>>>>?????, #BREAKFAST, KyraMichelle, Albert Einstein.
    • Photo: Priya Hari

      Priya Hari answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      My favourite experiment has to be the “screening.”
      I can actually explain it as if it was a screening or an audition for a film or a TV show, like the X-factor.
      Imagine me as the director as I decide what’s going to happen and my boss as the producer.
      I have 1000’s of siRNA (chemicals that should reduce the amount of protein in the cells) and I want to know which one’s stop my cells from becoming senescent. Imagine all these siRNA’s are the people giving an audition, and what they have to do is be the fastest growers (cells that divide the most).
      To find out which cells are dividing the most, I add a chemical to the cells that makes the dividing cells glow green under the microscope.
      I use the automated microscope to take all the pictures and count the green cells. Then there is a website online that can do the statistical analysis and tell me which siRNAs really caused the most cell division. This website is like the judges.
      This is a really cool experiment as you can get a lot of information from thousands of chemicals, really quite quickly.

      (I hope that made sense!)

    • Photo: Tatiana Trantidou

      Tatiana Trantidou answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      My favourite experiment is to build tiny structures in our nanofabrication lab (they are much much thinner than the width of a single hair). I first make a design in my computer (anything, let’s say I design the Big Ben but it is tiny- you cannot see it with bare eyes, only with a microscope). Then I take a glass slide and I pour on top a liquid that is very sensitive to red light. When this liquid is exposed to red light, it becomes solid. I then load my design onto a machine that has a red laser which is extremely focused (the laser light hits only a tiny tiny part of a surface).

      The machine sees that I want to build a tiny Big Ben. The software of the machine slices my Big Ben design into 10 horizontal slices. Then, it begins to build the base of the Big Ben (first slice): the laser hits the liquid on a tiny spot and the liquid becomes immediately solid at this spot. Then the laser moves a little bit and hits the spot right next to the previous one and so on, until it finishes with the whole first slice. Then the machine moves the laser upwards and builds the second slice just as before. When the machine finishes with the tenth slice, the Big Ben is ready. Basically, it was built from the bottom up! And there you have, a tiny Big Ben!

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