Question: What interests you the mostabout cells?

Elliot Jokl answered on 13 Jun 2016:

Thanks for the question!

There is an upside and a downside about working with cells. The upside is that they are usually fairly easy to work with (but not always!). You can do lots of different experiments that you might not be able to do with other approaches, such as looking at animals or people. This gives you a lot more freedom to play about with things and see what happens.

The downside is that they can only tell you a limited amount. So I work with muscle cells, so they can only tell me how muscle cells work. So if I see something interesting in muscle cells, it might not be true in animals and humans, because animals and humans are a mixture of all different types of cells, which all interact with each other. So just working with cells gives you a limited picture.

So you get to play around a lot more with cells, but you have to be a little wary about whether the results you get are what is really happening in animals or people.