• Question: Rosie, is it hard to find out information about the bacteria on your skin and why

    Asked by marjells10 to Rosie on 12 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Rosie Coates

      Rosie Coates answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      Hi @marjells10,

      It is quite hard to find out about the kind of bacteria I work on because not much is known about them yet… This also makes what I do exciting.

      Even though it’s hard to find information out there are some tricks and tools I can use; my main tool is my computer. Right at the beginning of my PhD I extracted DNA from the bacteria I’m looking at and I used a machine called an Illumina HiSeq to sequence it. This means the chemical reactions in the HiSeq made an electronic copy of the DNA sequence. I now spend my time using different computer programs to look at DNA sequence and see what I can learn from it.

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