• Question: What is the most interesting thing you have ever found out about in your job

    Asked by mariobalotelli45 to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 12 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Lydia Bach

      Lydia Bach answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Hey!

      I was working in a coral reef on an plant called coralline algae. It essentially looks like a pink rock:

      http://seabedhabitats.org/tag/coralline-algae/

      Coralline algae are really important because they are the cement in coral reefs: holding everything together.
      Climate change will change conditions in the oceans to more extremes (higher temperatures, more salt, more carbon and less oxygen in the water). So we asked: what happens to coral algae when this happens?

      So we did an experiment measuring how much coralline algae was photosynthesising (so producing sugar from sunlight) in a location where conditions are good and compared that with a location where conditions are bad.

      We found that the coralline algae were producing a lot of sugar under good conditions (they need oxygen, light, waves and so on).
      Then we changed the conditions to ‘bad’ (no oxygen, high carbon, too hot and too much light). We found that in the first few days the coralline algae didn’t do well at all, producing little sugar 🙁 , but after a few days they got better and produced almost as much as under good conditions 🙂

      That means that coralline algae may be able to survive at worse conditions because they can adapt to them, although we sill don’t know if they would grow at the same speed!

    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      Aw, I can’t talk about some of the coolest things I saw in my job because they haven’t been published yet, and I’d get in huge trouble if I told anyone before that 🙂 I wasn’t the main scientist working on those either, so I really couldn’t claim the credit.

      The most interesting thing I ever found out that I can talk about was back when I was still looking at marine bacteria to see if they produced chemicals we could use as antibiotics. We knew these bacteria produced chemicals that might be useful antibiotics, but we didn’t know what genes were involved in making them, and we figured that there might be more genes that coded for more antibiotics that we hadn’t seen because these bacteria were hard to grow and we mightn’t be able to create the environment that let the bacteria use those genes.

      We found antibiotics called polyketides, and others called non-ribosomal peptides, and those matched up pretty well to the chemicals we knew about, and that was great, and pretty much what I was hired to do.

      But I also found a bunch of the genes that made both polyketides and non-ribosomal peptides right next to each other, and it looked to me that they worked together to make some strange hybrid combination of the two types of antibiotic, which was very rare.

      I was right! 🙂 My supervisors and other scientists didn’t know what I’d found but they all agreed it was strange and interesting and should be studied further. Unfortunately my contract ended before I could continue the work, so it’s up to someone else now. 🙁

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