Question: Are there any exciting experiments your doing , or anything you've just found out about ?

Isabel Webb answered on 20 Mar 2014:

I work on a protein that helps bacteria convert gases from air into food for the plant. I recently planted lots of pea plants with a version of the bacteria which had extra copies of my protein. I was able to double the amount of reaction that the bacteria did – which is quite exciting for my project!

The experiment for this is quite cool. We inject a gas called acetylene into bottles containing my plants (and bacteria), and then an hour later use a syringe to suck the gas back out. We then have a special machine which we can use to detect what gases are in there, and see whether the bacteria are doing the reaction.