Question: do you harm animals

Ivan Campeotto answered on 12 Nov 2013:

No, I do not use animals in my research.
My aim is to find with X-rays the weak points of bacteria to develop medicines agains them.
In order to do so, firstly I have to purify the bacterial proteins, the ones that we know that are weak points. I have to purify them in an extremely clean way, so that crystals can be obtained (please see second picture from the top in my profile). When crystals are obtained, I fire them with X-rays and after some funky maths and physics, I can see how the protein looks like (please see third picture from the top in my profile).
I have to use X-rays to visualise proteins, because they are too small to be seen with normal microscopes and I do this at the Diamond synchrotron in Oxford (please see top picture in my profile).
After all these studies, when I know how the proteins look like in 3D, I can design a new medicine and test it against bacteria to see how well it works in fighting them.