I emailed my mentor a few days ago, asking for some papers for me to read in preparation for the tar extraction project - to commence in about a month. I thought, "Excellent. I shall have a few more sources of inspiration. These will count for a few more research checks or so."
"I have added 20 papers to your file server."
20 papers. Yes. This is awesome. I now have 20 new friends. Things are looking better now that I have these new sources of information. I always feel as though I should ask more questions at the lab, but don't feel informed enough to. In writing, that makes no sense, but it is real fear in the shadowy realms of my mind: asking uninformed questions.
I've been going to mentorship about once a week and partook in a pico green assay the week before last. This is another method for gaging the concentration of something in a sample and involves applying a stain to the sample which attaches to the genetic material (double-stranded DNA [dsDNA]). As little as 25 pg/ml of dsDNA can be detected using this method - that's 25 picograms (one trillionth of a gram) per ml (1 thousandth of a liter). Science!
I have no pictures to post but hopefully will soon.
SCCUR
It was enjoyable, to say the least. A day of presentations on everything from pancreatic cancer to chaos , poster sessions with passionate people, and a sandwich - you can't beat that! There was this one presentation on bouncing droplets on a vertically vibrating fluid bath. Here is a video of bouncing droplets to give you can idea of what I am talking about:
There was another presentation on green fuel production, another on TCR recognition in T-cells, and I caught the end of one on "plasmods". It's "between a dielectric and metal", whatever that means. That is a subject for research at another time...
I can explain the T-cell freshness, though. TCR stands for "T-cell receptor". Recall that T-cells are lymphocytes - proponents in the body's immune system. They differ from other lymphocytes in that they have the aforementioned TCRs that are responsible for recognizing and binding to antigens. In TCR gene therapy, anti-tumor TCRs are placed in a patient. The goal is to induce the T-cells in the patient to attack a certain virus or cancer specified by the type of TCR they are "transduced" with. The problem is that, sometimes, the introduced TCR's "chains" sometimes "mispair" with the the endogenous - this means, original - TCR's "chains". The point is, the transduced TCR doesn't get to do its job and make the patient's T-cells attack the target virus or cancer, and, sometimes, the T-cells become autoreactive and attack the patient's tissues. The point of the research project presented was to develop a way to detect the extent to which this mispairing occurs.
Pretty cool.
my poster, and a very nice fish tank through that door over there
Then there was my poster session, from 4:20 to 5:15. It was the end of the seminar, and I was set up at the end of on the side aisles, so I didn't get as many visitors as I would have liked, but those who did come by were all very interested in what I had to say. The prospect of the development of a new pharmaceutical excited them and they wished my good luck in my future. It was very encouraging. The undergraduates around my area were vaults of advice, giving me insight into their respective colleges, how they found their research opportunities, and insisting that I continue getting involved in research once I go to college, snatching every opportunity to further my expertise, including study abroad. This one student from Occidental College traveled to Costa Rica to study the effect of sunlight on the pH of the liquid in bromeliads. Another from UC Riverside was looking to carry out some mechanical engineering research, but found himself researching how salmonella attaches itself to the wax on spinach leaves. A UCLA senior told how nervous she was about getting grad school. Apparently, the applications are due this week on next.
One day, I will be one of these people, perhaps taking part in SCCUR next year or the year after - perhaps talking to a excited high school student during the last poster session of the day.
Coursera
The Coursera is going smoothly, though I've found that I much prefer in-person instruction. Dr. Redfield's optimism is contagious, though, even if she is all the way in eastern Canada. The making of life are unfolding theirs secrets to me with each lesson, and I've found another purpose in life: find the Romanesco cauliflower. It is a mutant of cauliflower, sometimes referred to as a broccoli, and featuring a partial fractal pattern that, according to Wikipedia, has been "modeled as a recursive helical arrangement of cones", whatever that means. I shall look that up some other time...
Dr. Redfield has attempted to procure one of these beauties at a farmers' market in her city, but to avail - motivating me to see one for myself!
Romanesco Cauliflower
Dr. Redfield is a magical woman.
Last week
This week
EQ My EQ is now "What is the most useful application for extremophile research in addressing global climate change." I have a few answers in mind. Judging from the google scholar alerts I get, quite a bit of extremophile research has been focused on biofuel production. Methanogens actually consume methane - a more severe green house gas than carbon dioxide and byproduct of cattle ranching and rice production. Perhaps methane can be used as a fuel source in the future. There's are oil spill clean-up by oil-degrading extremophiles. There's also the prospect of creating a better climate model by analyzing how deep-sea extremophiles cycle nutrients and produce nitrogen.
