• Question: Would you prefer to look at skin cells that change after time and look at the effects or do a disection and look at how the body works?

    Asked by coops666 to Amy, Karen, Sarah, Vijay, Will on 11 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Amy Birch

      Amy Birch answered on 11 Jun 2012:

      Hi coops666, do you mean would I prefer to look at living cells than looking at dissections from tissue that is dead?
      I’m actually lucky enough to be able to do a combination of both! I can make cell cultures of nerve cells which are mutated to be similar to nerve cells we find in Alzheimer’s disease and look at the effects of different drugs on their chemistry & how well they survive. This helps me to find out how specific drugs work at the cell level. I can also use these drugs on Alzheimer’s disease mice, and see how this changes their behaviour which helps me find out how drugs work on whole body systems. As well as this I dissect different parts of the brain from these mice (and also from human brains that have been donated to science) to see what chemical changes in the brain are linked to Alzheimer’s disease.
      Personally, I think that using lots of different methods to answer the same question is the most useful!

    • Photo: Sarah Martin

      Sarah Martin answered on 11 Jun 2012:

      Hi again coops666!
      Oh, that really depends on the scientific question I want to answer. If I’m working on a project on skin cancer, then I’d want to study two sets of skin cells over time – ones with cancer and ones without, so I can check what the differences are. I have actually worked on a few studies looking at cells changing over time, in fact one just now (open in the other window on my computer) of how a herpes virus affects immune system cells. I have never dissected anything, but if I was studying a disease, like for example a tropical infection, I may well want to take a look at what the infected organism on the inside to find out where one may be able to help with medication…
      How about you, do you have a preference?

    • Photo: Karen Reed

      Karen Reed answered on 13 Jun 2012:

      Hi Coops666, it really depends on what question you are asking. I must confess that most of my work uses the whole animal (mouse) and I do dissections, but we use cells when we can and don;t need to look in the whole animal.

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