Question: have you come up with any ideas that work?

Carolyn Nielsen answered on 18 Nov 2015:

Hi,

In terms of ideas for experiments yes I have had quite a few that have worked… and some that didn’t! It can be frustrating if you can’t figure out why an experiment didn’t work.

Most recently I wanted to see if we could detect the virus I study, cytomegalovirus, in the blood of people who we know are infected. The virus is normally latent (sleeping quietly in cells undetected by the immune system), but I thought maybe having different amounts of virus in the blood (called ‘viral load’) might explain differences between infected people in terms of how active their immune cells were. The positive and negative controls for the experiments worked, so the methods work, but we couldn’t detect anything in the blood samples we tested. So next week I am going to purify the type of immune cells we think the virus hides in most of the time, and only test those. Hopefully that will improve our ability to find the virus!