Question: How do the experiments vary? It sounds very repetitive!

Seyyed Shah answered on 18 Jun 2012:

That is an important question.

Often in science, we have to repeat an experiment more than once to check a result, or to make the experiment work. For example, if we get an interesting result from doing an experiment once, we repeat it and see if the result is reliable. Sometimes, when I do experiments I might make a small mistake which changes the result, so repeating the experiment means I am more confident about the finding. This may sound a little boring, but it is necessary for other scientists to take my work seriously.

One of the exciting things about doing research is that you are often doing something which has never been done before. So, when I test to see whether two protein are interacting with each other, I will use a particular technique, but change the way I do the experiment. I could:

– change the length of time it takes for a protein to bind.
– change the chemicals (buffers and salt) which the proteins are in (this may help them to bind better).
– Use a completely different method to look at the same thing.
– Develop a brand new method for doing something.

I have to think hard about how I want to do an experiment, because sometimes there is more than one way of doing it. This can be a challenge, and it makes my work more interesting. Often, scientists get unexpected results, and they have to do further experiments to analyse this in more detail. This can be very exciting if it is something major that hasn’t been seen before.