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I’m a PhD student which means I work in a lab doing science for 4 years while being watched by a more experienced scientist. I do this to learn more about how to be a good scientist before hopefully becoming a more independent later in my career. I currently work with bacteria…

We live with bacteria all over us every day. They are on our skin, up our nose, and in our guts. Most of the time they don’t cause us any problems and often actually help us live normal lives. One particular bacteria called Staphylococcus aureus is very common on your skin and up your nose. Unfortunately, because Staphylococcus is so common, it often has the opportunity to get inside us and when it does it often causes an infection and makes us ill. It can cause everything from minor spots to diseases that can kill people.

Each individual Staphylococcus bacteria has the ability to talk to the others around it using chemical signals. When there are only a few bacteria like on your skin, each bacterium cannot really hear any others so it remains calm (it’s quiet like being in a library). When there are lots of bacteria in a small space, the amount of these chemical signals increases and to the bacteria it sounds like very loud shouting (like lots of football supporters all screaming when their team nearly scores), at this point the bacteria get excited and occasionally violent. They release a lot of things which can damage or kill human cells and generally make people ill.

I am trying to make special chemicals which block this chemical shouting produced by the bacteria. Effectively I’m trying to put a gag in their mouths to stop them yelling at each other (bacteria don’t have mouths but you know what I mean!). Quiet, calm bacteria should not be able to make people as ill as loud, rowdy bacteria and your bodies defenses should be able to fight them much more effectively.

I’m normally in the office or laboratory from 10am until 6.30pm. Typically, a couple of hours a day may be mixing different chemicals in special ways to produce other new chemicals. A few more hours may be taken up removing unwanted stuff from my new chemicals. I then may spend an hour or two growing bacteria or mixing my chemicals with a specially modified bacteria to see how my molecules affect the bacterial communication systems. The rest of my time is generally taken up with carefully recording what I have done and what I have observed after each experiment.