• Question: what are you working on.

    Asked by iizninja to Antonia, Douglas, Hugh, Matt, Tom on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by kirstyloo.
    • Photo: Matthew Hurley

      Matthew Hurley answered on 13 Jun 2010:

      See my profile for the overview, but at the moment I’m seeing if garlic will stop bacteria communicating with each other. Bacteria are like an army – if they communicate well and work as a team they can be devastating, if you take away their means to work together (take away the way they make, transmit or recieve a signal) they are much weaker.

    • Photo: Hugh Roderick

      Hugh Roderick answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I am working on an African food crop called Plantain, it’s like banana but needs to be cooked before it can be eaten. It’s a very important food in West Africa where it is fried or mashed like potato. One of the problems that plantains and bananas have is that they aren’t very good at protecting themselves against pests and diseases. I’m putting a gene from rice into the plantain plant that stops little worms called nematodes from eating their roots. The nematodes can cause the plantain plants to fall over so the farmers can’t get the fruit. Nematodes can cause half of the plantains and bananas that farmers produce to be lost. So they are a big problem.

    • Photo: Tom Hardy

      Tom Hardy answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I’m working on new and novel ways of detecting explosives to assist in the fight against terrorism.

    • Photo: Antonia Hamilton

      Antonia Hamilton answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I study how the brain works and especially how you use your brain in social interactions like meeting other people or copying them.

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