Question: What is the most exciting part of your job?

Ian Hands-Portman answered on 11 Mar 2014:

Getting something new and being the first to see it – People bring me stuff all the time to look at and it’s often routine – the same preparation, stuff I could do with my eyes shut but when the same old thing doesn’t work and I actually have to think hard things get more fun –

We’ve been looking at the proteins bacteria use to resist antibiotics – we think several different ones join together but no-one’s ever found evidence that it happens. It took us three days of work mixing different proteins together and not seeing anything before we finally hit the right combination and we started to see almost flower shaped discs appearing under the microscope.

That’s one of the biggest thrills but it’s only the start of the work – now we have to get enough evidence together to persuade someone to pay for all the things we need to study it and probably spend five or six years before we really understand what’s happening.