• Question: whats your favourite science experiment

    Asked by 824mcrk29 to Lea, Emma, Christopher, Ashley, Ananthi, Aaron on 7 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by natiby.
    • Photo: Ashley Otter

      Ashley Otter answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      I would say either mutating bacteria or isolate of bacteriophages (little viruses that infect bacteria). Mutating bacteria involves looking for a gene of interest, then using a special method called recombineering to delete this gene. It sounds fairly straight forward, but it is really complex and involves lots of little steps.

      Isolating new bacteriophages is also really fun, as usually most bacteriophages you find are completely new.

    • Photo: Emma Stevenson

      Emma Stevenson answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      Mine has to be working with proteins that are radioactive to see if they interact. It’s such a cool experiment and you have results in a day (if your theory is correct!).

    • Photo: Ananthi Ramachandran

      Ananthi Ramachandran answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      My favourite science experiment is identification of bacteria from mystery samples. So you might get a sample of blood, or food that’s made someone ill, and you can do a few tests to find out what bacteria is in sample and what is responsible for making someone ill. You can then test different antibiotics on the bacteria and see whether it works and whether it will make the person better 🙂

    • Photo: Aaron Brown

      Aaron Brown answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      Mine isn’t really an experiment, more of a way to prepare grass for other tests … it’s called cryomilling.

      Basically what that involves is putting grass in liquid nitrogen to make it very cold (you also get to see all the steamy fumes coming from the liquid nitrogen). As the grass is very cold this makes it very brittle, this means you can crush it into tiny piece.

      I’m also a fan of experiments from when I was back in school; burning Magnesium in a bunsen burner and we even made bouncing custard balls one year! 😀

    • Photo: Christopher Richardson

      Christopher Richardson answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      I’d say inserting a gene that we know when used glows in the dark, into a bacteriophage as Ashley mentioned are little viruses that only infect bacteria. When that bacteriophage infects the bacteria and then a few hours later you have whole colonies of bacteria that suddenly glow in the dark!

    • Photo: Lea Carlesso

      Lea Carlesso answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      Mine is measuring the amount of organic matter in soils. To do so it is very simple, I “burn” my soil at 400C. I love working with the oven and the furnace and the smell of baking soils. It reminds me when I was working as a baker. I find it very comforting.

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