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Asked by to Keith on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Keith Grehan answered on 16 Jun 2014:
This is a tough one and I’m afraid my answer will be a bit boring in this area as really I’m just starting out in full time research. But during my MSc (Masters degree in science) I was lucky to be working on a really interesting project and I became the one of the first people to isolate some of the genes involved in the functioning of the immune system in bats and the first person to ever compare these genes between different bats species and to compare the bats genes to other non-bat animals.
By doing this I was trying to figure out if differences in these genes could be the reason bats seem to carry so many viruses. The results weren’t quite as exciting as I had hoped they might be but it’s always great to be the first to do something.
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Comments
Peter commented on :
My greatest result to date occurred during my PhD. I was investigating an enzyme that no one else had studied in detail. I found out many new and exciting things about this enzyme. The most important was that I showed the enzyme could make a product from a substrate that I gave to it. This was a massive result as proteins and enzymes are very complicated things and to find a chemical that interacted with my enzyme was a great achievement.
Bethany commented on :
Some of my most exciting results are currently being written up…so sadly they’re still top secret at the moment. During my PhD though, I found that of the 18 hepatitis C epidemics I was studying, all but one of the epidemics were dated to within the last 100 years. This was modelled using sequence data alone – but reiterated how important recent modes of transmission such as blood transfusion and needle sharing have been in the spread of hepatitis C.