• Question: If you choose to study infectious diseases would you choose bacteria or fungi?

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      Both are interesting and I’ve have happily worked on either but there seem to be more jobs working with bacteria than fungi.

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      I would probably choose to study bacteria, as I know more about them, and we’ve already got thousands of clinical bacterial sequences that need to be analysed – the methods are still trying to catch up with the amount of sequencing going on! However, there’s no reason why you couldn’t do both. I primarily work on viruses, but a lot of my methods are also applicable to bacteria so I get to work on them too.

    • Photo: Keith Grehan

      Keith Grehan answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      Well I picked Viruses 🙂
      But if the choice was between the two I think i might go with fungi but this is just because when i was an undergraduate student we had a brilliant lecturer in fungal biology and he really got people interested.
      I think either way would be fascinating though as they both cover entire kingdoms (and you could say bacteria are 2 kingdoms) of life so really there would be so much to cover you would never be bored 🙂

    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      I would chose bacteria as I find them more interesting and I also have a better understanding about how they behave and how to grow them etc.

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