• Question: What has been the hardest experiment you have done so far?

    Asked by InxAlfa to Eoin, Ester, Natasha, Paul on 16 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Natasha Myhill

      Natasha Myhill answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      I think the hardest experiment I have done was last year I had to try and use fluorescent live imaging of cells to capture a video of two proteins coming together and changing colour – I dont think it worked very well and I had to spend many hours in a dark room staring down a microscope to try get it to work. I think I did get a few videos of the cells but they werent as good as I wanted.

    • Photo: Paul McKeegan

      Paul McKeegan answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      @Natasha It’s a shame that didn’t work as it sounds awesome!
      Mine was probably an experiment where I had to measure several different factors of the same embryos in one day, before grouping 10 embryos with similar metabolism for genetic experiments. As I had to measure lots of embryos to find 10 that were similar enough, this took a good 12 hours+ each day! I then had to send the final embryos off to colleagues in Canada to do the genetic stuff and, when I got to Canada, half of my samples had not survived the trip! I then had to do the whole thing again. It was worth it in the end, though as we have loads of information and can link metabolism and genetics in a way that is very unusual. (Although we are still analysing the data, several years on!)

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