Question: What’s by far your favorite experiment to do ? X

Remsha Afzal answered on 8 Nov 2018:

Hi Lily! Hope you’re well! hmm my favorite experiment involved seeing how macrophages (a type of cool immune cell in our body that eats up bad bacteria and viruses) can change their shape and function depending on what environment you put them in. If you expose them to a bacterial structure, they become big and angry, and release all these chemicals that are basically ‘danger’ signals to other cells saying ‘we have an invader’. But then there are other kinds of chemicals you can use on the macrophage to calm them down. They change their shape and function and become normal again and stop releasing those ‘danger’ signals. I did an experiment called an ELISA where the color of the liquid where the macrophages were kept would go dark blue if the macrophage were angry and it would be clear if they were calm. I like color assays 🙂