This week on the Naked Scientists we have an action-packed show for you; there will be three specialists - one in each of the following areas: viruses, fungi and bacteria. If hearing about the latest developments in these fields isn't enough; you can get creative ahead of next week's show with our step by step guide to doing a bit of your own research! Intrigued? Quite right too … read on for more details of what's in store.

The three experts which will feature on this week's show are Alison Ashby, Elizabeth Sockett and Stacey Efstathiou.

Ali is an expert in fungal plant interactions and especially the interaction between Pyrenopeziza brassice and oilseed rape. Her interests lie in fungal sexual development and its significance in the spread of light leaf spot disease. She studies sex factors produced by the fungus and identified mating genes and proteins involved in the sex process. She is also interested in "fungal hemi-biotrophy" this is the ability of a fungus to evade host defence mechanisms and grow in planta without causing and visible signs of physiological disturbance to the plant. Disturbance occurs once the fungus is ready to release asexual spores. She hypothesises that fungal cytokinins (these are fungal derived plant growth hormones) play a role in this process.

Recently she has focused in two slightly different areas: using "intelligence" driven approaches to understand the diversity of fungal and other microbial associations with plants and promoting fungal science to the wider audience.

The intelligence driven approach is a new but rapidly developing area and relies on using the science of Ontology - a science which establishes linkages within the wealth of worldwide information present in accessible data sources. These linkages when joined with knowledge from scientific literature, anecdotal evidence and historic sources can be captured, structured and networked to generate a single 'mind map' of knowledge in a contextual format - in other words an intelligence network. This type of intelligence driven approach can be used to ask key questions, for example "why can some fungi kill plants, others cause minimal damage and others cause no disease at all?" It can also be used to identify gaps in current knowledge which aids choosing the direction of future research. In this area she works with Biowisdom (www.biowisdom.com) who are world leaders in the development and application of Intelligence Networks for life sciences.

As regards her other area of recent focus - promoting fungal science to the wider audience; tune into the programme to hear Ali describe just what it is that puts the "fun" into fungi.

Liz is a Professor at the Institute of Genetics in Nottingham and her research focuses on flagellar motor mechanics and swimming predators as living antibiotics. Flagella are microscopic bacteria driven by the rotation of natural nanometers that are powered by hydrogen ion conductance. She studies how flagella are built and how they function in the photosynthetic bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides. She also studies the predatory motile bacterium Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus. These "living antibiotics" use motility and chemotaxis to locate niches rich in Gram negative bacteria - which is what they prey upon. She is working to understand the predation process and to see how it may be applied to kill pathogenic bacteria.

Stacey works at the University of Cambridge on herpes pathogenesis. Following an acute primary infection all members of the Herpesvirus family establish a lifelong latent infection within the host which can subsequently reactivate to infect susceptible individuals. Stacey's main focus of research is the mechanisms by which herpesviruses evade the host immune response and subsequently establish latency. In the case of herpes simplex virus; he is investigating the regulation of gene expression during latency and reactivation using in vivo models and primary neuronal culture systems. These studies use recombinant viruses carrying reporter genes under control of either lytic or latent cycle promoters which allow patterns of gene expression to be monitored within individual cells. These systems are used to investigate the role of the virus encoded latency associated transcripts in the regulation of latency and the role of histone modifications in the control of virus gene expression.

He also studies the pathogenesis of the lymphotrophic herpesvirus MHV-68 (isn't that a sexy name for a virus? It actually stands for Murine Gammaherpesvirus 68, but it doesn't mind being called MHV-68 for short). This virus affords the opportunity to investigate the role of individual gene products in both acute and latent gammaherpesvirus infection. This virus genome has been propagated as a bacterial artificial chromosome allowing the efficient production of virus gene knockout mutants. The rapid generation of virus mutants and their subsequent characterisation in vivo provides an opportunity to reveal strategies adopted by this group of viruses to persist in the host.