What have YOU personally discovered?

Question: What have YOU personally discovered?

Asked by dand543 to Louise, Michaela, Sian, Steve, Yvette on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: Your Research. This question was also asked by , kimg, 04rjohnson.
- Michaela Livingstone answered on 14 Jun 2010:
  
  I have personally discovered that a couple of proteins are involved in getting a gene’s message of the nucleus and in to the cytoplasm so that it can be made in to a protein – that’s involved quite a few experiments and each one has shown a little bit of information as to how they go about doing that! There’s quite a bit more involved in finishing that story though. More specific than that?
- Sian Harding answered on 14 Jun 2010:
  
  that the beating cell in the failing heart needs more SERCA to function properly
- Steven Kiddle answered on 14 Jun 2010:
  
  I have discovered a way to predict which genes may turn other genes on or off. From this i tested to see if a gene that was predicted to control many other genes is important for plants defence against disease and it was!
- Louise Johnson answered on 14 Jun 2010:
  
  In order of comprehensibility, I’ve found out:
  
  How often wild yeast have sex.
  How “jumping genes” – bits of DNA that copy themselves – can help sex to evolve.
  That a certain kind of jumping gene, which makes up 10% of human DNA, is more likely to be a parasite on human genes than to be helpful to us.
  That in computer simulations, genes will often evolve to share tasks rather than do one task each (which also happens in real life, and the computer simulations might help us understand why).
  That jumping genes could have helped animals to evolve from single-celled organisms.
  That a bodysnatching flower fungus – a disease which makes its host plant change sex! – has a subtle way to control its own jumping genes by mutating them on purpose, and that different kinds of the fungus are better at it than others.
  That the funny kind of reproduction this fungus does – it’s called “automixis” – has weird consequences for its genome, which might explain why it carries so many broken genes
  A new way that the genetic code – the way DNA is read to make protein – could change over evolutionary time.
  
  I think I show a bit less focus than some scientists, and a lot of this is theory work so real lab biologists might think it’s rubbish! But there are so many cool things about the living world, there’s lots to discover.
- Yvette Wilson answered on 14 Jun 2010:
  
  So far I have discovered how plants integrate signals such as temperature, energy resources and day length to know when to flower. I have also discovered how the geological history of Europe shaped the genetic patterns and therefore characteristics of plants that grow there.

Question: What have YOU personally discovered?

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