• Question: What kind of hospital tests have you devised?

    Asked by to Hannah on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      I’ve just finished working on a test that does DNA fingerprinting for a bacterium called Clostridium difficile. This bug can cause diarrhoea in hospital patients and can spread from patient to patient if we are not really careful. By doing DNA fingerprinting on bacteria from the sick patients we can tell if it got spread from patient to patient or not. If we know it’s spreading we need to make sure that all the infection control (like cleaning) is being done properly to try and stop it.

      Other tests I have worked on recently are tests that can find bacterial DNA in clinical samples for when we can’t find the bacteria by growing them.

Comments