Question: what types of cell did you do your difficult electrical technique on?

John Foster answered on 12 Mar 2014:

Hi,
I used this technique on a type of immune cell called a T cell. These help to fight infection in your body, but only after lots of other cells have had a go first. What was special about these particular T cells was that they were taken directly from people (kindly donated by other students and staff). They were also called “naive” t cells, meaning they were brand new just made cells that had never seen an infection in the person’s body!

The difficult electrical technique involved attaching a tiny glass needle to the outside of the cell (you could only see it under a microscope). This glass needle had an wire in it that could work out the current passing through the cell. This could tell us about what ions (charged atoms) were passing through the cell, and even what proteins were letting this happen!

It took a long time to learn it and get it just right, but I was really pleased when I did!