I mostly look at how proteins from superbugs recognise nutrients in the host environment (our bodies), in my case metals like zinc and manganese. Bacteria use metals to activate enymes used for all sorts of things required to make us sick: Fighting our immune systems many attacks, attaching firmly to infection sites, and using food sources for energy. We are hoping to find ways to use this against them and turn this into new medicines.

here’s some various pictures of MRSA – methicilin resistant Staphylococcus aureus one of the worst superbugs. it gets into wounds and makes them bigger and pussy! it’s called aureus because the symbol for gold is Au and as you can see it’s actually gold in colour

Here’s an edible, greatly upscaled version of the system I work on that I made last year for a special work cake.

To do this, I take the gene for my protein of interest and put it into less dangerous E. coli and grow up about a litre. Then I shoot the E. coli at a sheet of metal at twice the speed of sound to break them open (all safely contained within our cell disrupter)

I then have to remove all the other proteins E.coli make so I have a pure protein to do experiments with. To do that I use several types of special resins and beads in columns. You can see two of them here .

Then I can test which metals my proteins recognise and whether we can block them so the bacteria starve to death or are too weak to defend against our body’s immune system.

Some days I get to send bacteria flying at twice the speed of sound, others I heat samples in plasma to 1000 degrees to identify metals. And some days, I get to just sit at my desk and write up what I’ve been doing in the lab or read papers. Bet you can guess which days I enjoy more.

A Few years back, the PhD students a year ahead of me, organised Wheelin’ out Science, where they travelled to places like Whyalla and Woomera (5-8hrs drive away) to run hands on workshops for the students there. Sadly, the sponsor didn’t fund the program again. So I would use the $1000 to send myself and my friends at the Mobile Science Education unit to some of South Australia’s more isolated areas to show kids just how awesome and fun science is with interactive demonstrations. Check out how awesome their shows look