Question: have you had any break through's in your work?

Clare Taylor answered on 12 Nov 2012:

In some of the work that I did during my PhD we found out some new and interesting stuff about a bacterium called Listeria monocytogenes: my work was the first to show that a certain gene was present in Listeria and that it was important for the bacterium to be able to cause infection because if you inactivated the gene, the bacteria were harmless and were killed by the immune system. I was able to publish the findings of this work in a scientific paper so it was pretty exciting! Since then, others have gone on to show how important this gene is to allow the bacterium to adapt to changing conditions inside the host. So I like to think of it as a breakthrough because it was the first time that we knew about that gene!