Question: What is the most interesting thing you have seen through a microscope?

Ashley Cadby answered on 1 Jul 2012:

I think there are two things I think are interesting. The first are the bacteria we look at, they look like little doughnuts. This is because the bacteria are spherical but we only see a slice through them. I think they are interesting because we hope to learn how to kill bacteria, at the moment no one know how antibiotics work, so we could really help.
The second system I’m interested in at the moment are nano-lines of patterned proteins. These are lines made by chemists and biologist at Sheffield which are mode from proteins taken from bacteria which use light to power themselves, similarly to plants. We are hoping that if we make nice thin (20 nm wid)e lines we can use the proteins to transfer energy along the wires. This would be really useful because the bacteria have evolved to use quantum mechanical phenomena to transfer energy very efficiently and fast. By doing this we can steal ideas from nature, it should be really cool.