• Question: What is the most interesting thing you found in your studies?

    Asked by samhardie to Lewis, Ian, Jess, Divya, Clare on 8 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by , , emma4963.
    • Photo: Lewis Dean

      Lewis Dean answered on 8 Mar 2014:

      There are lots of things that we have found, but one of the things that I think is really cool is to do with ruffed lemurs (see the photograph on my profile page).

      In ruffed lemurs it is the females that are in charge and the males that follow them. However, what we found was that when there were more males in a group, the females were more powerful. They got much more of the food from the puzzles and didn’t let the males go near it. When there was only one male and lots of females, the male tended to be able to get more food from the puzzle.

      It is pretty cool, because it could tell us a bit about how the groups work in the wild.

    • Photo: Divya Venkatesh

      Divya Venkatesh answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      I’ve answered a similar question before so I’ll modify that here:
      In my research, I study a particular set of proteins called ‘SNAREs’. There are 26 SNAREs in the trypanosome and they are quite important to its transport system (which it uses to move proteins and other things around the cell, and which is very important for it to survive in our blood).

      An example of what I’ve found is that around 60-75% of the SNAREs in trypanosomes are the same (or have evolved from the same SNARE) as the ones in humans! This means that the other 25-40% of the SNAREs in trypanosomes are new, or have changed beyond recognition during evolution. (Is it because they helped trypanosomes adapt to their environment? How so? … etc. )

    • Photo: Ian Hands-Portman

      Ian Hands-Portman answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      For me it just keeps coming back to those deep sea viruses! New species living in boiling acid water.

      I often come across things that are intriguing or weird – I still want to know what my little ‘octopus’ things are on my profile, nobody knows and it’s bugging me. I spend occasional lunchtimes looking for them and one day I might find the answer – not useful science but curiosity for its own sake.

    • Photo: Jess Smith

      Jess Smith answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      We found new ways of shaping our implant, so that it can go in completely flat (making it an operation where you probably don’t have to go under general anesthetic- currently you do), and then it will expand into the shape that we have told it to! Pretty cool, and very useful!

    • Photo: Clare Nevin

      Clare Nevin answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      We have found that compounds produced in the body when you are diabetic are found in seminal plasma and they generate oxidative DNA damage to sperm DNA, which could affect their fertilising capacity.

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