Science in the City

Our first line of evidence – the differential growth patterns of our two strains of cells (normal, and mutant) with and without treatment (0-10X)

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For your viewing pleasure – here’s a sample of the films we’re trying to produce.  It’s the second thread of evidence I previously described that we’re pursuing in telling our story.

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The third line of evidence looks at membrane organization.  The image at left represents a normal cell, with distinct polar domains.  The center mutant is the strain identified in last year’s high through-put visual screen (HTVS) and it shows a polarity defect, in which the membrane is uniformly distributed, with no polar, or diffuse ends. [...]

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After a week of pretty consistent 50% efficiency at completing experiments successfully, I decided last night to set up four total projects, so that I might get more than one data set out of my work on Friday.
To my happy surprise, all the cells I set up grew.  So instead of hustling to find the [...]

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Without suggesting a pretense I don’t intend, I can now say I know why those astronauts spend so much time in the pool simulating what they’ll be doing once they’re on-orbit.  There’s the abstract, intellectual concept of what one intends to do, and then there’s the actual fact of being able to physically accomplish the [...]

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The first couple of days in the lab this week have had something of a two-steps-forward, one-step-back sense about them. On the one hand, I’m getting more confident with my own technique and command of the protocols I’m working with. But at the same time, I’m each day taught another of the many [...]

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One of the components of the Columbia Summer Research Program is a weekly check-in meeting with other similarly placed teacher-researcher colleagues. It’s a great opportunity to share one’s experiences and serves a lot of other purposes, from conducting necessary lab safety training to hearing visiting scientists discuss their research to exchanging instructional best practices.
This week, [...]

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In a suggestion of the speed and complexity with which the ‘work’of the Summer has ramped up, I’m only getting around to creating my third posting…over a week after the last one! Perhaps a weekly entry is less ambitious, and more do-able than a daily?
Anyhow, much progress is being made, but at the same [...]

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Today, the puzzle pieces, electronic as they are, fell better into place, and I learned a more sophisticated technique for copying the genome of a protein in a bacteria, then pasting it into a ‘BLAST’ server to identify any conserved versions of the same gene over in my target species, the fission yeast. Doing so, [...]

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