• Question: What is the strangest thing to happen in your research?

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ramya Bhatia

      Ramya Bhatia answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      The strangest thing that has happened to me in my research is still a mystery to me. I had a student who was doing a short project. I gave her a bit of HPV (human papillomavirus – a virus) gene to do some experiments with. For three months she struggled to make her experiments work but they did not. Then i decided to get the sequence (as in ATGC… which tells us what the gene really is) of what i gave her and what she was actually using for three months and what we found was amazing. The one i gave her was the HPV gene that i intended to give her and what she actually had now belonged to a completely different virus that causes cold sores called HSV (herpes simplex virus) which no one in our lab works with and we have never used before. No one could figure out where that came from!

    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      One strange thing I have found is that when you extract the DNA of the bacterium E. coli and store it at 4oC (in the fridge) it keeps for ages, if you store it at -80oC (a really cold freezer) it keeps for ages but if I keep it at -20oC (the temperature of a normal home freezer) it breaks down and degrades really quickly. I still have no idea why this happens but I just keep all my DNA extracts at -80oC.

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Interesting question. I think one of the things I find strange (and slightly frustrating) is when I’ve written some code to do an experiment or analysis and it works…and then I try running it again the following morning and it suddenly doesn’t work. Even worse, it gives me lines and lines of unhelpful error warnings! Some of my colleagues say that the same thing often happens in the lab too – one day a certain piece of equipment will work, and for no good reason the same set up will refuse to work at a later date!

      Very odd…

    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      A provoking question that I am racking my brains to find an answer to. I guess it would have to been when I went on a conference in Italy a few years ago. At the conference dinner I was sat next to possibly the man who first invented the field of science I was studying at the time. I was so honoured to meet him but what made it a funny experience was that he had no interest in talking about his work but was asking for my help in coming up with a plan to escape the dinner so that he could find a bar that might be showing the baseball game he wanted to see. We spent about 20 minutes planning more and more elaborate escape plans. He was then called to the stage an immediately started talking in great detail about his past achievements and how the field would progress in the future.

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