• Question: What is an interesting experiment you have done?

    Asked by anon-256630 on 11 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Alex Holmes

      Alex Holmes answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      One of the coolest experiments I’ve ever done was use a cryo-electron miscroscope! They’re about 15ft tall, cost over a million pounds and basically shoot electrons at whatvever you want to image. For me, this was a protein, which was only about 0.0000002 m big! The microscope meant we were almost able to see the indiviual bonds and atom locations of the protein, which is really really cool when you think about actually SEEING those things!

    • Photo: Alena Pance

      Alena Pance answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      Hi Claudia, one of the coolest experiments I have done was an accident! yep, I was trying to differentiate stem cells into red blood cells, which is done in 4 steps. The length of the first step is quite crucial… as I discovered, because if one leaves it short, something like 4 days, then the stem cells are not quite primed to become red blood cells, but if left too long, more like 8 days, then they attach to the bottom of the plate in clumps and start beating! yes, like little hearts in a dish! I was astounded… of course, this is because both cardiomyocytes and blood cells originate for the mesoderm layer of the embryo so they have a common ancestor, but I (and I don’t think anyone knew) didn’t know that mesodermal differentiation is so time-dependent.

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