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I recently made a video about my work, which you can watch here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJHkIbO1RAw&feature=youtu.be

To be honest my workdays consist of a lot more things such as meetings, answering emails, presentations, conference calls, tutoring, going to seminars, designing experiments, buying new chemicals and equipment and reading about other peoples research, but working in the laboratory is to me the most exciting bit.

When I get into work I usually make myself a cup of tea and start the day by  reading and answering emails. I then have a chat with the pathologist (the person who determine the type of diseases by looking at patient tissue under the microscope), to hear if there are any old livers coming in from the hospital. If there is, I’ll then go collect it and the pathologist and I will cut it into small pieces  so I isolate the hepatitis c virus genome from the liver. Isolating the genes from a liver can easily take the whole day, so I have to store the genome in the -80C freezer overnight so I can continue work on the next day. Before I leave work I usually make a plan for what I’m doing in the laboratory the following day.

The next day I’ll defrost the virus genomes and make a more stable copy of it. Unlike humans, the hepatitis c virus genes are made up of RNA and are a lot less stable than DNA. I therefore start by making a DNA copy of the RNA, so I can continue working with the virus genes. The copy DNA is then used to make thousands of new copies by a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and ones we have enough copies the copy DNA is send to another laboratory which will identify the unique code of the virus genes. They will send the information back to me and I will then spend weeks looking at the gene structure and use complicated computer programs to determine how the individual hepatitis c virus in the liver are genetically related to each-other.