I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying the causes and processes of illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
Well, I don’t actually make viruses. Most people who work in this field don’t make new viruses either; they some times make new forms of the viruses we already have, but they do this to study how they work. It would be like figuring out how baking works by changing the ingredients you use when you bake a cake; if you change the amount of salt and figure out how the taste changes, or even replace it with sugar and see what happens, you can get an idea of what salt does in the baking process. Similarly, people will make changes to viruses (say, knocking out a gene) to see what happens as a result. Do they stop infecting their host? Do they infect more quickly? There’s lots of things to try!
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Hehehehe, I don’t make viruses, but I use (abuse) them!
In science, we often take stuff from nature and modify it to our use! So as you know, viruses are infectious. In the lab, we work with viruses which have been slightly modified, so that they are no longer infectious! A virus is just a piece of DNA/RNA with a protein coat around it. We can knock-out the part of the DNA that makes proteins needed to multiply inside cells and we can also add DNA with our gene of interest.
So we use an adenovirus (normally a standard cold virus), which can now only infect a cell, but I cannot replicate inside the cells. So as long as we use gloves and a mask, we’re fine! For my virus, I’d added a gene that encodes a protein I’m interested in. So if we chuck this virus onto cells growing in a dish, the virus will enter the cell and then it will start to produce my protein of interest using the machinery from the cell!
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