24
10/06
No Biology Blog?
Just go through Slashdot once, and you’ll find links to articles and such on a myriad ‘techno’ blogs. There are obviously writers who blog, like Samit Basu and as a result you have the literary blogs as well. But I have hardly come across any good Biology blogs… and that gives me ideas – I am going to write here about my experiements. I think some young people might get to know what biology is really about – which means that it is NOT about knowing the Latin names of a hundreds of organisms, nor is it about mindless cutting and hacking of creatures (astonishingly, that is what some people think!)
Tomorrow I am going to have a run of experiments in the morning with the confocal microscope and so I am transfecting cells. Oli – (Oliver , the post doc who I am working with now) said he thinks the laser is developing an oscillation. For the uninitiated , laser oscillations are a bad thing.
If you are looking through a tiny hole (confocal-ness), focussed on a tiny little cell (about 2 microns), through laser excitation on smaller area trying to figure out bright spots on the membrane of the thing…the whole setup BETTER freakin’ not move!
So that’s why they have buffered tables , and suspended microscopes and so on. They help, but they aren’t perfect. We’ll find out tomorrow about that, I guess.
The microarrays aren’t here yet, but we are expecting them anytime this week . After that, things should get even more interesting. I want to see the correlation between Quant. PCR and Array Intensity for measurements of mRNA conc. Anyone have any experience with that …apparently, it can be done, but is highly variable from group to group and system to system….
). I mean, sure, its more work and you have to do things like arrange your dinner (I refrain from using the word ‘cook’ – its just not an accurate description of my activites preceding ingestion) and so on . But in the end it is more satisfying.