9 September 2022

It is always scary when someone in your family is admitted to hospital, even if it’s just a routine procedure. No-one wants to stay longer in hospital than they have to, and healthcare-acquired infections happen all the time. These are infections that immunocompromised patients catch while in hospital, which are increasingly caused by superbugs that cannot be killed by any drugs on the market. Prevention is always better than cure, so how do we prevent superbugs from emerging in the first place? Today we are talking about superbugs - what they are, why they are becoming more common, and how a scientist can create a superbug in the lab to better understand this whole process.

19 August 2022

Laboratory training is a rare, expensive, and time-consuming process, especially in research and development or R&D. You’re not just repeating someone else’s perfected standard operating protocol, it is up to you to design all the steps and make sure they are foolproof. In learning it’s not enough to copy the perfect version of events that someone else has mastered, you have to know all of the ways something can go wrong so you can reverse engineer and troubleshoot any situation. Troubleshooting experiments is a complicated topic, and over the next few weeks I am trying to break this down for students across different lab techniques. Today the focus will be on antibiotic sensitivity testing - the experiments that will flag any new superbugs that will cause havoc in the population because none of the available drugs we have can kill them.