• Question: What have you found from your research?

    Asked by anon-196670 to Sebastian, Paddy, Lee, Jennifer, Fiona, Eleanor on 12 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Sebastian Cosgrove

      Sebastian Cosgrove answered on 12 Mar 2019:

      Throughout my time as a researcher I have found several things that are new! During my PhD I found a new way to form chemical bonds using UV light! This could be used to replace old methods that use precious metals (such as palladium or rhodium), which is unsustainable for the future.
      In my postdoctoral research (after my PhD) I have discovered some new enzymes that can be used to produce chemicals which have antimalarial properties. I have also recently found a new way of making a potential plastic from waste sugars that are produced by the dairy industry. We are able to convert these waste sugars into something called a monomer, and that can be converted into a polymer, which is the basis of all plastics. The idea is however, that because this is from a natural source it could then biodegrade! If we could convert the millions of tonnes of this waste sugar to biodegradable plastics then hopefully this could help to reduce our dependance on fossil fuel based plastics!

    • Photo: Fiona Scott

      Fiona Scott answered on 12 Mar 2019:

      I have found out from my research that you can use molecules to shut down a particular enzyme, without shutting down its closely related neighbour enzymes. I also know that my molecules are able to stop a few samples of cancer cell tissue from growing. I have also found out that you can make molecules that are smaller than conventional drug molecules to do this.

    • Photo: Eleanor Senior

      Eleanor Senior answered on 12 Mar 2019:

      So far I have created a new genome and found a few thousand new genes! We still don’t know what they do and hopefully when I have time i’ll be able to look at them in more detail and find out which ones make vaccine targets. I have also found how my parasites respond to envrionmental change

    • Photo: Jennifer Harris

      Jennifer Harris answered on 14 Mar 2019:

      I found in my Masters and PhD research that the immune system is switched off very early in cancer development and hence when doctors are deciding when to deliver immune therapies to patients, the earlier they can diagnose the cancer the better!

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