• Question: What have you discovered?

    Asked by 358gdna49 to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 11 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by ashchn, 653gdna37, JayDot.
    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Personally, I have discovered some of the things that a single protein from a bacteria (called Legionella pneumophilia) does.

      But also, during my PhD I designed a new way of testing how this bacteria causes disease by injecting caterpillars with the bacteria. It turns out that the caterpillars respond in very similar ways to mice so we can use them instead of mice which is very good for the mice! It sounds like a small thing but I am quite proud of this, it means we can continue to do research into what makes bacteria dangerous but we dont have make mice sick!

    • Photo: Daniel Parsons

      Daniel Parsons answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Hi there,
      My most recent paper highlights that the stratification (that is how thick it is near the bottom compared to the top) of a turbidity current controls how far it flows.

      A turbidity current is a flow driven by density differences. Water with lots of mud in it sinks because its heavier than the surrounding water. Massive turbidity currents occur in the ocean and these are massive avalanches of sand and mud that travel from the continental shelf to the abyssal deep sea. They can travel upwards of 10 meters a second for 4000 kilometres – and they travel through some of the biggest channels on Earth! See here for one of my pictures of these channels:
      http://clasticdetritus.com/2010/08/15/sea-floor-sunday-70-black-sea-submarine-channel-system/

      We have a big problem in trying to measure these things – they happen only now and again and any attempt to measure them destroys all the equipment we put in their way! We know how fast they can go because the break all our fibre optic cables that are laid on the sea-floor – the 1929 Grand Banks earthquake set off a turbidity current that broke nearly all transatlantic telephone cables at the time and we could work out when the current got to each cable by the time the line went dead!

    • Photo: Tora Smulders-Srinivasan

      Tora Smulders-Srinivasan answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      My most recent discoveries have been in the area of Parkinson’s disease:

      I’ve found specific proteins that are within mitochondria that may be involved in the brain cells that are defective in Parksinson’s disease.

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