• Question: what do you use in your experements.

    Asked by gracebasham to Callum, Gina, Katie, Michelle, Sam on 14 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by owenburton.
    • Photo: Sam Godfrey

      Sam Godfrey answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      I mainly use cells. I grow them up in little plastic dishes with a special liquid food. Then I can set up experiments with the cells. This means that I don’t have to use people or animals for my experiment and lets me do them many times over to check my results.

    • Photo: Callum Johnston

      Callum Johnston answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      Hey Grace, I use brain cells like Sam too. For the experiments I do on them there are lots of other things I use. Sometimes I look at how much energy they are using by putting a liquid on them that changes colour when they use up their food. For other experiments I have to get all the proteins out of the cell and fire them through a machine which tells me how much of each protein there is.

    • Photo: Michelle Linterman

      Michelle Linterman answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      Hi Grace,

      I use lots of things in my experiments. The main ingredient is usually white blood cells, most of the time what we do is mix the cells with different florescent tags that can attach to parts of the cell. We then put the cells in a big machine with 5 different lasers to excite the florescent tags and get them to send out different colours of light. This can tell us what type of white blood cell the are.

      Michelle

    • Photo: Katie Howe

      Katie Howe answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      Hi grace!

      I work with egg cells. Because a lot of people have ethical problems with using human egg cells for research we use egg cells from mice as they are very similar to human eggs (because we are both mammals). Everyone has to do a training course though to make sure the mice suffer as little as possible.

      I grow these eggs in an incubator which is set at 37oC (body temperature) to keep the eggs warm and happy!

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