Question: what have you found out

Ian Wilson answered on 16 Jun 2013:

Hi jwhittle13,

Thanks for the question!

Honestly, so far I’ve only found out a few things! Trouble is, you spend a lot of time in a PhD doing experiments and, in my case, making lots of data, and then loads of your results and conclusions come right at the end. So I’m working on lots of different things at the moment but don’t have any clear results yet!

What I can tell you is that I’ve gone through all of the DNA (which is called the ‘genome’) of a species called Entamoeba moshkovskii and worked out where its genes are in all of that DNA. I did this by getting a list of all of the genes in two closely-related and better-known species and looking for those genes in E. moshkovskii. I also managed to spot some genes that only E. moshkovskii had. This is because the start and end of genes are almost always the same, so I just hunted for these pieces of ‘start’ and ‘stop’ DNA.

I’ve also started comparing 4 different species of Entamoeba. They’re all quite closely related (kind of like cousins I guess) but live really different lives. One infects humans and causes disease; one infects humans but doesn’t hurt us; one lives out in the open; and one infects reptiles. Since they have such different lives you’d expect them to need different genes to survive. From what I can tell so far, that doesn’t seem to be the case! I have no idea why though, so I need to keep digging!

Hope that all makes sense – feel free to ask away if you have any other questions 🙂

Cheers,

Ian