what was your favourite thing you discoverd

Question: what was your favourite thing you discoverd
- Keywords:
  discoverd,
  favourite
Asked by messi to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 10 Nov 2014.
- Ciarán O'Brien answered on 10 Nov 2014:
  
  I can’t actually talk about my favourite thing I discovered, because the paper I helped write about it hasn’t been published yet. 🙂
  
  The second favourite thing I discovered though was a cluster of genes in the DNA of a Streptomyces bacteria that lives in a marine sponge found off the coast of Galway. We found that it made chemicals that were very good at killing off bugs that were already resistant to most antibiotics, so we decided to find out how it made them by looking at its DNA. We found a series of genes called “non-ribosomal peptide synthetases” that pretty much made a manufacturing line which produced this chemical.
  
  That means we can take those genes out of Streptomyces, which is hard to grow and potentially dangerous, and put them in another bacteria that’s safer and easier to grow, like E.coli, and mass produce this antibiotic which can help control some superbug infections that hospitals are having a lot of trouble with these days.
- Lydia Bach answered on 10 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!
- Victoria Simms answered on 11 Nov 2014:
  
  That little kids can do amazing things, especially solve quite complex problems, if we give them the right tools to do the task!

Question: what was your favourite thing you discoverd

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