Valentine's day for Biologists

Being a scientist can be lonely, with little time for love - outside the love of science! To prove that we are still capable of emotion (and pattern recognition) here's a few pictures I found via a quick google search. In the true spirit of science I'll also tell you what they really are to dispel any undue sentimentality,

This one is taken from Helen Jacques and is a picture by Mathieu-Benoit Voisin and Doris Proebstl from London. "The researchers are studying how white blood cells move from the blood into into damaged tissue to cause inflammation; for example, after a heart attack. They were using using fluorescent pigments to stain two key players in this inflammatory process – pericyte cells from the blood vessel wall (stained red and blue) and collagen (green) – when looking through the microscope they noticed that the cells had arranged themselves into a heart shape"

This one is cheating a little but it's animated. You have to go to the web page to see it though.

This one is sweet...

That's the effect of tuberculosis in the lung of an infected mouse.

I guess the take home message is that scientists get bored when spending hours on a microscope and that horrible diseases can at least look romantic while they are infecting or killing you.

And let's not forget what the real thing looks like.

 Happy Valentine's day!

SILAC'S BACK! :)

For those of you who couldn't bare the cliffhanger of my last post, here is some good news - the cells seem to have clawed their way back and are now looking good for being confluent before the media is exhausted.

Phew.

Other decent news is that my antibody and the siRNA works. Ish. There's 3 bands, two of which disappear with siRNA but the strongest band not so much. Antibody for gene2 doesn't appear to work and instead looks like a dirty smear. This is the reason I didn't check the results until today. If I'd seen that at the weekend I would have felt the time spent there at the weekend was for nothing and have called it "bad" news. On a Monday I'm more prepared for things not working, hence this is "decent" news.

Are you confluent? Not nearly confluent enough.

On Friday I had to decide whether my "super-confluent" cells for my SILAC experiment were superconfluent. Unfortunately the lab "Aragorn" wasn't in to advise me and it looked like a do or die scenario. After consultation with other members of the fellowship lab it was agreed they were confluent enough and that they may die without more food. So I went ahead and split them.

I was in at the weekend and the king had returned. I told him about the scenario and he told me they weren't confluent enough and chances are the media will be used up before the cells are confluent again. As we are awaiting more SILAC media it could be the experiment dies.
"Aragorn" warned me; "A little more caution from you; that is no trinket you carry"

Now I just have to cross my fingers that those cells make an amazing comeback over the next 5 days.

Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater

Started a SILAC experiment which i still maintain sounds like a great name for a villain, preferably a cyborg one. I've been told repeatedly that it's quite an expensive process so I was very focused on not screwing it up - so much so that I forgot to think about screwing up other things. Case in point I was splitting my cells, with gene-GFP stably expressed, into the SILAC medium and forgot to keep some of the cells for maintaining a line with.

Checked the -80 stocks and I didn't have any left so I'm going to have to reinfect the cells. Logic dictates it worked the first time so should work this time but experience dictates it probably wont be that straight forward.

The SILAC experiment remains on track for now though.

I'm still giving my flies the silent treatment due to their refusal to show a phenotype and for the P-element excision giving utterly bizarre PCR results that make no sense whatsoever. I'm starting to think the gene may be the gene for using quantum mechanics as it can only be observed indirectly as a null but never directly.

When Lab Colleagues Leave

A colleague from the lab left this week. He'd accumulated quite a lot of kit over the years and as he was tidying up on Thursday the rest of us began circling like vultures trying to find the prime pieces of meat for when he left. I actually cheated and asked him if I could have some of the boxes.
He officially left on Thursday and I think if there had been a time-lapse from 6pm Thursday to 11am Friday it would have looked a little bit like this (don't watch if you find decaying animals upsetting).

On one hand it feels a little disrespectful removing a person's stamp on the lab but on the other it's good that we recycle equipment and don't waste money buying new stuff all the time. The other perk is that there is a little more room for me to use now as I can use his bench to do stuff when mine is cluttered. The only downside is that the only other person in the bay area will also be leaving in a few more months and then I'll be all alone in my domain. Unless someone else joins the lab and then I'll have to start scent marking centrifuges, fridges and freezers.

Good luck to Colin, with whom I was able to share many silly scientific flights of fancy. I will remember him whenever I use his scissors, large Gilson and stopwatch.

When lab meetings go well

Had to give a lab meeting this morning which meant a decent chunk of the weekend was spent preparing one. This was particularly difficult as I feel like most of my projects aren't really going anywhere and the fly side of things feels reminiscent of the phrase "throw enough 5h!t at a wall and something will stick" but with a frictionless wall.

Anyway, I decided to tell things as they are and suggest I should maybe focus more on tissue culture for the time being as that has the greatest potential of turning into a paper at the moment. The flies can come into it later once the biochemistry gives me some targets to home in on.
The great thing about the meeting is that the rest of the lab were keen to offer suggestions and help with various experiments that should move the cell culture along and I came out of the meeting with at least 3 experiments to do and a plan of action to keep me busy for the next month. One good thing about being the "fly guy" in a lab of tissue culture and biochemists is that there is a lot of knowledge to draw from.

It's always a good meeting when you walk into it on a low and come out of it, enthusiastic about beating the project over the head in a variety of (hopefully) productive ways. Thanks to the PI and the rest of the lab :)

Sometimes you have to be really careful labelling things.

There were two events at work today where I realised you have to be really careful when writing things down. the first was fairly innocent. I was using primers for PCR. One of the ones I wanted was "NJP082" but that's a squeeze to write on the top of an eppendorf so I settled for "82". Unfortunately I then discovered a "28" and I don't numerically categorize the diluted oligos...

I will try and remember to get a photo of this to prove the problem. For now, here is an example - keep in mind it's a lot smaller when on the top of a PCR tube.

I did a little bit of detective calligraphy and was able to work out which one was which but decided to make up a fresh dilution and underline it this time around.


The second issue was more problematic