• Question: are you lookiing at bad or good viruses? hello

    Asked by joshuasm8962 to Debbie, Glyn, Jon, Kat, Nicola on 13 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Nicola Fletcher

      Nicola Fletcher answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      Generally I look at bad viruses. Hepatitis C is the worst kind of hepatitis you can be infected with, as the medicines cause a lot of side effects and there is no vaccine or cure. I’m also going to start working with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in the next few months. This will be really exciting and I hope I will make some good discoveries because lots of people are infected with both viruses but not much research has been done to find out what happens with people who have both HIV and Hepatitis C.

    • Photo: Jonathan Stone

      Jonathan Stone answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      Sorry @joshuasm8962 – i’m not looking at any viruses!

    • Photo: Glyn Barrett

      Glyn Barrett answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      I work with bad bacteria but I am actually looking for good viruses to kill the bad bacteria. They are called bacteriophage which literally means “bacteria-eater”. Chomp chomp!! They are absolutely harmless to humans.

    • Photo: Kathryn McMahon

      Kathryn McMahon answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      The viruses I use in the lab are neither good or bad – they’ve been altered so that they can’t spread infection easily. We use them to infect small numbers of cells growing in dishes. They infect the cells, and give them some DNA that we’ve put in the virus. This DNA contains a gene that turns the cells green, like this:

      http://www.imm.ox.ac.uk/wimm-research/molhaem/veronica-buckle/Hela_GFP_CAPD3.jpg/view

      We can then look at the cells with our microscope.

    • Photo: Debbie Crockard

      Debbie Crockard answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      Sorry I don’t know much about viruses – think Nicola is the expert 🙂

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