• Question: have you ever made a different organism while being a scientist or befor?

    Asked by 8maz to Laura, Lily, Mark, Paul, Sarah on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sarah Bardsley

      Sarah Bardsley answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Not personally no. But scientists around the world are looking to be the first to build an entirely new organism. This is called synthetic biology and its a very new and exciting field of science. Scientists want build new organisms so they can design new functions which helps us do things like produce clean fuel or remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to help stop climate change. But don’t think new species will be owned as household pets just yet. The new organisms will not be big, they will probably be like bacteria to start with and be used in labs and factories.

    • Photo: Lily Asquith

      Lily Asquith answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Only my daughter

    • Photo: Laura Maliszewski

      Laura Maliszewski answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Kind of. I’ve engineered bacteria to make proteins and things that they don’t make in nature.
      So I took a bacteria that existed, and made it be a color it wouldn’t ever be randomly in nature.

      A lot of molecular biology is actually trying to turn molecules bright fluorescent colors so you can see where they are in a cell and how they change or move. So I’ve made a lot of cells glow-in-the-dark by transforming them to express proteins like Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) or Red Fluorescent Protein (RFP). GFP and RFP exist in jelly fish naturally, but now we can put them in almost anything.

    • Photo: Mark Roberts

      Mark Roberts answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      Yes – well kind of – as part of my work I manipulate the DNA of bacteria to change how their signalling pathways work

      So in some ways you could say that I make a different organism each time I do that process.

    • Photo: Paul Roche

      Paul Roche answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      I’m an astronomer so we don’t get to play around with chemicals or anything like that, so I’ve never made an organism – although some of my attempts at cooking have resulted in things that look like they are some sort of alien life form….

      (or as Lily says, if you count children then I am responsible for 2 “unusual organisms”!)

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