Question: hello scientist, whats your best experiment im curious about them

Keith Brain answered on 17 Jun 2010:

In our own lab, my favourite experiments involve studying how nerves function. Calcium is very important inside cells, and so understanding how it changes inside them is important. We can fill nerves with a compound that glows in the presence of calcium; if we put these nerves under a microscope, shine a laser beam on the them, and then see how much they glow, we can determine how the calcium concentration changes. For example, in one important set of experiments were we interested in working out how drugs that act like nicotine act on nerves called “sympathetic nerves”. This is important, because drugs that act like nicotine are being used for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, but we don’t understand what effect they’re having inside nerves. So, knew that nicotine increases neurotransmitter release, and we hypothesized that it did so by increasing the amount of calcium entering the nerves when they received an electrical stimulus (which usually comes from the brain). So, we tested this hypothesis with experiments – and guess what – we were wrong! However, what we did see was that when you added nicotine-like drugs, the resting calcium concentration went crazy – it didn’t just go up, but it started spiking up and dipping down again. This led us on to a whole series of further experiments to test our ideas about what could be causing these spikes and what it meant for the function of nerves.

The interesting point here is that some of the most important findings in science come when you find the unexpected, something that contradicts your ideas about what should happen. By the way, I’ll try to get a movie of these calcium spikes in the nerve terminal up on my profile page later this afternoon.