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Asked by Lucia_S to Bex, Sam on 13 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by Mia.Lewisxx.
Question: What is your favorite experiment you have done?
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Rebecca Thompson answered on 13 Jun 2016:
Ooo good question! I think my favourite is one of the first I worked on using electron microscopes. I was studying what happens when a protein folds up wrong into rope like structures we call amyloid fibrils. These are very small, about 10 nm wide (0.00001 mm). The first time I looked at these I was amazed that we could see them, and the level of detail we could see. For example, you can see the different fibres that twist together to make the rope. After this, I was completely hooked on electron microscopy. Seeing structures this small is like peering into a secret world of tiny structures, its amazing!
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Sam Briggs answered on 13 Jun 2016:
Hi Lucia_S,
Such a fun question and probably far too many answers so I’ll just give you three:
1) An undergraduate experiment where I made a hologram in a dark room for a day, holograms are so cool as they encode all of the information for image reconstruction at every point in the film via phase capture information, photons have something called phase which tells you about the point in the wave and thought they are. This means if you take a hologram you can cut it in two but if you look at it you can still see all of the image, with a photograph you can only see half if you do this!
2) A chemistry undergrad experiment I did involved making hydrogels, I could make a gel in seconds and had to do it in the dark because it involved light sensitive chemicals – that was fun!
3) My current research means I get to use something called an atomic force microscope. THis lets me inspect the surface of my compartments that I make, and this one time I saw some really cool she’ll structures that confirmed a theory I had about the system, I nearly leapt for joy when I saw it!
Hope that helps?
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