-
Asked by looneymidget to Louise, Michaela, Sian, Steve, Yvette on 13 Jun 2010 in Categories: Your Research. This question was also asked by darkfighter, lozzie, tpanda1517, tugii.
Question: What makes you fascinated about genes and why do you want to discover things about them?
-
Steven Kiddle answered on 12 Jun 2010:
Genes are instructions for how to make up a human (or any other animal/plant/bacteria) – and why we are all slightly different from each other. If we understood this then we could make medicine better by personalising it to the individual. The fact that our genes are similar to a worm and we are so different to a worm means that we have a lot to learn about what life is and how it works.
-
-
Sian Harding answered on 12 Jun 2010:
Its not just genes but biology in general that fascinates me, and genes are the main controllers. Every single day I see or find out something about how it all works that makes me say “wow”. And to make a prediction about how an experiment will go, just from something you thought in your head, and then to do it, and to sort out the problems and finally to find out you were right. That is just the best thing ever.
-
Yvette Wilson answered on 12 Jun 2010:
Genes fascinate me at so many levels. I’m always amazed at the different plant and animal life forms, for example, an elephant compared to a shrew. I know that it is because of differences in the genes that each individual has and I want to find out what those differences are and how they have got to be different if elephants and mosquitoes evolved from a (very ancient) common ancestor.
At a smaller scale I wonder how genes make a plant plant grow…how do they know when to be active? How have they evolved? Which other genes do they affect? What happens if they stop working properly?
At an even smaller scale…what are the chemical interactions that make genes be expressed? What are the properties of the proteins that they encode?
There’s a lot that we don’t know!
-
Louise Johnson answered on 12 Jun 2010:
They build us! Or we build ourselves using them, if you prefer to see it that way. And they connect all living things – you and me and cats and giant sea scorpions and daffodils and bubonic plague spores use a lot of the same genes.
-
Michaela Livingstone answered on 13 Jun 2010:
Genes themselves are pretty amazing, but I’m actually interested about WHEN, WHERE and HOW MUCH a gene is ‘switched on’ or ‘off’. It’s pretty amazing but we actually have a lot of the same genes as chimps, mice and other animals, yet we are quite different – so I’m interested in how that difference comes about. For me it’s not so much what genes you have but how you use them! Genes being switched on and off are important in both development and general processes in the body, like responding to external factors, like disease! I’d like to find out about how genes are switched on and off in cancers and what causes those genes to get switched on, that way we might be able to find treatments.
Comments