• Question: What are you trying to find out in your research??

    Asked by tugii to Louise, Michaela, Yvette, Steve, Sian on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by graciiebaybiie, chickensoup, googliebear, siddiq, thefus1.
    • Photo: Michaela Livingstone

      Michaela Livingstone answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I’m trying to find out how the cell controls which gene’s are switched on and off.

      Basically, a gene has the instructions to make a protein, and that protein carries out the actual function. Before the protein gets made though a copy of the gene, called a messenger RNA needs to get out of the control centre of the cell, the nucleus where it’s made, and in to the cytoplasm where the machinery that makes proteins are found. The process that controls what gets out of the nucleus or not (we call this export) is carried out by a set of proteins and it is some of these proteins that I’m looking at. If a gene’s message can’t get out of the nucleus then the protein that it codes for can’t get made, and so that gene is said to be ‘off’.

      We generally understand how this process works, but there’s some evidence that suggests that under certain conditions, like when a cell turns cancerous, specific proteins involved in the export process wrongly allow proteins that worsen the cancer to get made.

    • Photo: Louise Johnson

      Louise Johnson answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I’m interested in lots of different questions, most of which boil down to *but why does it do that*?

      A paper I’m writing at the moment, for instance, is about why there are three different “stop codons” in human cells – that is, there are three different ways the genes can tell the cells to stop making protein. Why three? Why not two or one or seven or forty-four? Some colleagues and I have been trying to think of possible reasons and then find ways to test them.

    • Photo: Yvette Wilson

      Yvette Wilson answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      at this stage in my project I’m trying to find out which barley genes are involved in making lignin in plants. So far I have managed to find a few candidates, based on what genes make lignin other plant species. I’m about to test what they do in barley by making mutations in them at the moment as if they don’t function properly then the plants may be different

    • Photo: Steven Kiddle

      Steven Kiddle answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Im trying to find out which genes plants use to protect themselves from disease. I use data on which genes are turned on at which times to try to work out which genes control other genes, and test these in the lab

    • Photo: Sian Harding

      Sian Harding answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I’m trying to see which changes in heart failure are making things worse and which are trying to help. The idea is that the body’s response to a poorly beating heart evolved to respond to sudden blood loss (much more common in prehistoric times than diseases of old age). It stimulates the heart in the short term, but damages it more if it goes on longer

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