• Question: have you ever worked with animals if so which ones ?

    Asked by anon-310794 on 2 Feb 2022.
    • Photo: Melanie Krause

      Melanie Krause answered on 2 Feb 2022:

      I have worked with mice in two different labs where we were studying heart development (we wanted to find out what gene makes some peoples hearts not form properly) and Crohns disease (an inflammatory bowel disease where we were looking for ways to treat people).
      In my current work I only use human cell lines to study infection and gene editing.

    • Photo: Valerie Vancollie

      Valerie Vancollie answered on 2 Feb 2022:

      I have worked with rats at uni where I was looking at the effects of MDMA (the active component of ecstasy) on the developing adolescent brain when given as human teenagers would take it.

      I then also worked with mice for over a decade. Those had 1 gene knocked-out (made inactive) and then we ran them through a pipeline of tests with normal, control mice. We wanted to see what differences there were so that we could start to figure out what that particular gene does.

    • Photo: Jonny Coates

      Jonny Coates answered on 2 Feb 2022:

      I have worked with fruit flies and now I work on mice. But I have also worked with human samples (knees, blood and lungs). They all have upsides and downsides and so we choose the best one for the question we are asking and wherever possible we reduce the use of animals like mice.

    • Photo: Prabs Dehal

      Prabs Dehal answered on 5 Feb 2022:

      I worked at a company developing insect repellent so I worked with mosquitoes.
      We had to put the cream on our arms and stick our arms into a box containing the flies to see if they were repelled. It was not nice and I developed a severe allergy to the bites!

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