• Question: what is you biggest discovery you made so far??

    Asked by anon-241384 to Martin on 18 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Martin Johnsson

      Martin Johnsson answered on 18 Mar 2020:

      Oh. I actually find it pretty hard to frame my research as big discoveries.

      I have been involved in discovering: better maps of the DNA of chickens and pigs, showing the (rough) locations genetic variants that contribute to bone quality, growth, size of the comb (that’s the fleshy ornament on the chicken’s head, yes 🙂 ), fearful behaviour, and several other things. I certainly hope those are useful, not sure if they count as big discoveries. 🙂

Comments

  • Photo: Ross

    Ross commented on :

    This is a really good question. And like Martin it is sometimes hard to frame my research as big discoveries. However one of my most meaningful contributions was not related to food research but when i worked on the process of co-transcriptional splicing. During my time studying that subject i was the first person in the world to show that splicing (removal of non coding bits or RNA) had an impact on transcription (DNA to RNA) and actually causes the enzyme that carries out transcription to pause. This is now widely accepted and you will actually see this written in textbooks, so that is pretty cool to see