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Asked by gibsonol02 to Amelia, Richard, Prateek, Liz, Jim on 15 Jun 2011.
Question: How many science experiments do you normally do in a day, and how long are they normally ;)
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Prateek Buch answered on 14 Jun 2011:
this is a good question. I normally do experiments that last several days if not several weeks – so usually it’s more a case of doing three or four bits of different experiments in one day, then waiting for a while for results – can be hard to keep track 🙂
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Jim Caryl answered on 14 Jun 2011:
It’s quite tricky to say really as our science experiments aren’t really like the practical work done in schools. The quickest of my experiments usually involves about 2 hours of manual work, and if something goes wrong I usually have time to figure out what went wrong, and repeat it. Most of my experiments take over a week to perform. This is because I make bacteria compete against each other in a race to see who can grow the fastest, but we continue to grow them (and give them more food) every day for a week, before working out who won.
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Amelia Markey answered on 14 Jun 2011:
The experiments I do most often with my device last most of the day.
I mix the chemicals with the DNA which takes about 30 minutes by the time I’ve got everything together. Then I put it all on my device and leave it for 4 hours 10 minutes then I collect it which takes about 30 minutes. When I then look to see if my DNA has been copied that can take about 2 or 3 hours.
There’s also lots of bits to do to prepare your experiments so I have to grow my cells and keep checking them to make sure they are happy 🙂 I also have to get the DNA out of them which takes up to an hour. Things like making my device and the equipment I need to make it work usually take the longest because I need other people to help me (which depends how busy they are) and it takes time to get the right materials.
If I can I try and run a few experiments at the same time but that’s usually a recipe for disaster as I can’t keep track of everything that’s going on…
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Richard Badge answered on 14 Jun 2011:
It varies according to the type of experiment, but the shortest ones – for example analysing some human DNA to see if the people have a particular jumping gene might take just a morning.
If we need to look at a lot of people, we usually do 100 or so samples at once – the biggest experiment I’ve ever done personally involved analysing over a 1000 people in 4 different regions of their DNA and took about two months.
Finally some experiments that generate a lot of data usually take longer – we are working on an experiment at the moment that we started nearly 9 months ago. A lot of this time was experiments to make sure we prepared the DNA correctly, then we collected nearly a million pieces of DNA using an expensive machine (cost £250,000!). Getting the raw data took 10 hrs and processing it took nearly 2 days on our most powerful computer.
Finally analysing the results has kept us busy for the best part of 2 months…
Richard
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Lizzard O'Day answered on 15 Jun 2011:
it can depend… somedays you can race around and you may screen 100s if not 1000s of potential drug compounds (robots make this a lot easier) other days it may take 4 days for you just to finish 1 experiment.. and there’s a lot of prep work that goes into everything.. you need to carefully plan out your experiment– time management is crucial to being a scientist, there’s always another experiment you can do but often there’s not enough hours in the day to do it!
Comments
gibsonol02 commented on :
ok thanks, have you had any major experiments that you have been working on recently or are they all as important as eachother, I am just interested 🙂
Amelia commented on :
Some experiments are more important that others. So with my work I do a lot of testing of the reaction that copies DNA at different temperatures, volumes etc but then the major test comes when I try it on my device because you just don’t know what’s going to happen.
Jim commented on :
The major experiment I am working on today is to see whether making a particualr bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus) is make sick by changing something in its DNA. This change in its DNA will actually make it able to not be killed by a type of antibiotic medicine that would normally kill it, but even with this new special protection it has, it may overwhelm the bacteria and it may die.
Jim commented on :
…that should read: “The major experiment I am working on today is to see whether a particular bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus) is made sick by changing something in its DNA. This change in its DNA will actually make it able to not be killed by a type of antibiotic medicine that would normally kill it (i.e. it is made ‘resistant’), but even with this new special protection it has, it may overwhelm the bacteria and it may die.”