Question: Is biotechnology an important part of your job?

Sandra Greive answered on 5 Mar 2017:

Biotechnology is a very important part of my job. It provides the tools that allows me to make and manipulate proteins so that I can understand how they work. Things like new advances in molecular biology enzymes (DNA polymerases and the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)), new bacterial strains for protein expression; new methods for specifically isolating your protein from the protein “soup” that is inside your farming bacteria. Chemical biology, where we can change a protein in a small specific way to allow a specific chemical tag to be added (like a fluorescent dye) so that we can track its movement and behaviour. Some people even use these fluorescently labelled proteins in single molecule experiments with special microscopes. The more we understand about how biological molecules work, the better we can engineer useful properties in them. I want to use biotechnology manipulate the portal protein, to understand how it controls DNA moving through it and if it is possible to engineer it to “sense” the different DNA bases as they move through – single molecule DNA profiling!