Question: What’s the toughest experiment you ever did

Katie Fala answered on 18 Nov 2019:

Hmm, I’m not sure! So far probably it was getting a certain experiment to work. It involved growing bacteria on a large petri dish filled with agar, killing them and then covering the entire plate with another agar containing an indicator bacteria that would basically change colour if the original bacteria were producing a compound that could interfere with the systems that bacteria use to talk with eachother. Basically it was supposed to be relatively simple, but something different went wrong each time I tried it and I couldn’t rely on my results. It was very frustrating, especially as each experiment took 1 week, I felt like I was wasting so much time. In the end I had to methodically go through lots of different parameters until I found the root cause. It can be difficult to persevere through the frustration sometimes, but it is a great feeling when a difficult experiment finally works out.