• Question: What is the most interesting thing you have found from your research?

    Asked by Mod Em on 12 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Azarmidokht Gholamipour-Shirazi

      Azarmidokht Gholamipour-Shirazi answered on 12 Jun 2020:

      There are lots of things that we have found, but one of the things that I think is really cool is how food materials show different properties while under shear (for example pushing it out from a syringe). Many of them that you expect to flow, become very solid

    • Photo: Bethan John

      Bethan John answered on 12 Jun 2020:

      One of the coolest things I found was that Liver Fluke, the parasite I study, can survive in silage. Silage is grass which is cut in the summer and stored over the winter and fed to cows and sheep when the weather is too nasty for them to graze outside. Previous work on parasites surviving in silage and on grass is really old – we are talking 100 year old studies! Most of the old research found that liver fluke could not survive in silage but my findings were the complete opposite! We have since been able to publish our data in lots of farming magazines and do a podcast to let farmers know about the new risks I have discovered about livestock parasites surviving on their farms 🙂

    • Photo: Dimitra Angelopoulou

      Dimitra Angelopoulou answered on 13 Jun 2020:

      I still have a lot of experiments to do to finish my research, however so far the most interesting thing I have found is that the stomata of a plant (stomata are the pores on the leaf surface that allow carbon dioxide and water to come in and out of the plant during photosynthesis) play an important role in stopping the spread of a fungal pathogen!

    • Photo: Martin Lott

      Martin Lott answered on 13 Jun 2020:

      I spend a lot of time analysing data and I find it interesting to find something useful. I looked at HIV strains some years ago and, alongside others, we were able to show that a ‘pure’ strain was in fact a recombinant. This work to better understand the evolutionary history of HIV helped understand transmission and origin so that ultimately my collaborators were able to pinpoint the source of HIV to Kinshasa in Africa.

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