• Question: How often do you do experiments???

    Asked by Emma The Penguin Lover to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 17 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Lydia Bach

      Lydia Bach answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Hey!

      I do experiments almost every week. I am working in the lab every morning, mostly dissecting the fish that I caught before. But often I have to work on the mass spectrometer, which requires me to prepare the samples with acids and do experiments to test if the samples are ready to go in the machine.

    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Pretty often!

      A typical week will have me trying to juggle two or more experiments at once. Looking at bacteria takes time, so the experiments are fairly long. You need 2-3 days for bacteria to grow, another 2-3 days to get their DNA, another 2-3 days to purify it and clean it up, and another day for the sequencing machine to turn it into data (and there’s always a queue for that machine so you can be waiting several more days 🙂 ) then it takes anything up to another week to study the results and figure out what they mean.

      all that time and waiting means I try to be doing two or more experiments a week to make sure I’m always busy. The last week has been a bit of a break from that though, I’ve been taking a little time off to answer as many questions for you guys as I can 🙂

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