Question: What do you test you experiments on. Do you get cells from different things and then insert the virus.

Eva Weiss answered on 9 Nov 2015:

I am purely computational. We have some friends in the lab who run experiments for us and then we look at their results and try to make sense our of them. The conclusions I draw will then be used again to run experiments to test, if they are true.
So
1) We get data: In the lab they take the coat protein from the virus of interest and find which random pieces of RNA bind to it (we are interested in interactions between viral coat protein and viral RNA)
2) We make sense out of it: I get a list of RNAs that bound to the protein and use clever methods on my computer to find patterns. I want to find a pattern that can be tested in the lab again
3) They test the pattern: The put the viral genome into bacteria, which then make the virus. How well the virus is made, tells you how healthy the genome was. Normally these viruses are not in bacteria, this is a system used in the lab to make things simpler. They make changes in the patterns as found in the genome and then see how well the virus is made.