Question: What tip of technology do you use!

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 12 Nov 2014:

Oh, lots of different kinds.

Right now I’m using a special kit that bursts open bacteria and harvests their DNA.

Tomorrow I’ll be using gel electrophoresis to see how much DNA I got, and what size chunks it’s in. Gel electrophoresis is like putting the DNA through a big sieve, and the larger bits will get caught at the top, and the smaller bits get caught further and further down.

Next week I’ll be cleaning up DNA with microscopic, magnetic beads. DNA has an electric charge which will be attracted to or repulsed by the magnets. If the DNA is too small its charge will actually repel it from the magnets, and if it’s too big it won’t be drawn to the magnets quickly enough to stick, leaving me with the DNA I want to look at stuck to the beads. I can wash the stuff I don’t want away and send the rest off to the sequencing machine to turn it into computer data.

Once that’s done, I’ll be using a high-powered computer network to analyse all the data. The network isn’t in my lab, so I’ll be using the internet to access it from here. It’s hundreds of computers linked together so they’re very, very fast, but there’s so much data to get through it will still take 8-10 hours of calculations to analyse!