Question: in what way would your work help solve real life problems or answer necessary questions?

Jane Charlesworth answered on 18 Mar 2014:

The lab I work in are trying to speed up a lot of medical procedures that at the moment take a long time. For example, when someone gets sick at our hospital what happens now is that the doctors take a sample (poo, sick or blood) and send it to a lab, where they see if any bacteria grow. The problem with this is that some bacteria can take weeks to grow. What we are trying to do is find ways to speed this up–by sequencing the genes of the bacteria straight from the sample. That way we can work out more quickly what bacteria are making people sick and other important questions like whether they are resistant to antibiotics.