Project 365–Jan 2012

 

By now I assume everyone knows what a P365 is. This year, as per last year that went anonymously into a 3rd-party photo site, I am doing a Project 365. Keeping it simple, I am doing it from camera phone/point-and-shoot only. The idea is to create inspiration when you only have basic tools to work with instead of the real DSLR> January was busy – my creativity is someone zapped.

 

 

And yes I am aware there are more than 28 days in January….. –3 for me I did take a couple on the point & shoot but can’t find them at thm. Will edit if they appear.

A few things to share

I am all for GMO’s – I mean seriously – half the damn crops we eat today barely resemble the natural parental crop – so whether it is lab generated or generated by intensive growth selection by farmers, the end result is the same. However – some things you don’t mess with. This story for example - http://blog.friendseat.com/kraft-uses-genetically-engineered-growth-hormone/ seems a little disturbing and is certainly worth reading into. The recombinant growth hormone fed to cattle in the US dairy industry generally would not be a good thing. particularly if the higher IGF-1 levels are significant.

Also – how evil does my cat look in this picture. He looks kind of posessed.

Two funny videos from youtube:

Randomness

and a bit of fun/cruelty…

cat laser pointer bowling

Oh and don’t forget this one from the ch10 news desk.

http://youtu.be/j8Bc7eRTdWY

In other random news – invitrogen now has the fluorescence spectra viewer as an app for iOS. The ipad2 came out and it has a pretty cool cover – the other updates are less than expected.

My phone bill is expensive.. my cat is crazy. i’m off to adelaide for four days and I seem to still have a job – albeit with a lot of hardcore microscopy.

I have foxtel – yay for full res sports rather than B grade streams that constantly cut out.

And yeah – science is still as despressive as ever… well life is lately too – but c’est la vie.

oh the pretty lights

So recently I went to a conference on lights. Pretty lights. Fluorescence if you will. Lights in Life Sciences 2009. Damn impressive. What people are visualising with ocnfocal microscopes, widefield microscopes, 3d structured illumination, PALM, dSTORM, STED microscopy etc. Being able to visualise single proteins within a cell via a tagged fluorophore. It’s impressive. Kudos to the people coming up with the new technology – and to those developing the new fluorophores (a  lot of these techniques require photo-switchable fluorophores such as dendra, eos, PS-CFP2, kindling etc). I can easily see why the big journals are asking for this sort of technology rather than basic microscopy and “colocalisation”. I am glad to have a project that has allowed me to develop skills in advanced confocal microscopy.

I think I want to learn every available technique and then consult out.

I also covered my poster at the conference and a second poster for the ever evolving http://Researchgate.net

hmm. back to work I guess.

p.s. clannzu sounds damn good with rain in the background.

visually disturbing

A few visual sights I have found disturbing recently:

- A 5yo girl wearing a miniskirt so short I saw her g string when she bent over.

- A pink toilet bowl on the side of the street that someone had taken the initiative to use (hard rubbish collection, where people dump furniture etc on the side of the road).

- Someone had stuck a photo of a guy on the cow up a tree - http://blog.panedia.com/2007/04/27/docklands-cow-up-a-tree/

-clayton

-One of the regulars at my local pub spill bill on himself because he was trying to drink while pissing at the urinal.

- An indian cabby getting changed in the back of his cab (fully changed).

-The amount of blood that can be mixed with snot when you have a seriously blocked nose.

-The fungus growing on one of my supposedly ‘bacterial’ plates.

- The ants pouring out of the mini-CBD buildings in the docklands and running to get to the train station (by ants I mean people in suits).

Important questions to ponder

Why must one walk up a rampfrom the footpath to get to “lower ground” in my complex?

Why was there one supra, one mitsu Evo X, one GTI, one skyline GTR, 2 HSV coupes a WRX STi, a civc type R (rally prepped) and 2 highly modified nissan patrols in my apartment carpark at midday? Why spend lots of money on a car then leave it parked in the garage all week long.

Why does the name “Craven Cottage” sound so cool?

Why did the butcher let me down? (Worst lamb shanks ever for diner tonight, I swear the sheep must have been 20 yr old reject stock).

Merlo or Di Bella?

Why does the microscope work fine when your cells don’t express the protein properly, but screws up when you get good clean expression?

Enough questions for now anyway…..

On another note, I’m going to cross post my ResearchGate Blog posts from their to hear aswell. Starting with this one on Gene therapy to restore color blindness.

A recent Nature letters paper by Mancuso et al details the use of a recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) in gene delivery to restore the function of photo-pigments in squirrel monkeys. The male monkeys, red-green color-blind from birth, obtained the ability to process red-green color information via the delivery of the L-opsin gene into the retina. 

While this research opens the door for further hope of gene therapy involved in human eye conditions, including blindness, it also raises some interesting questions. It was previously thought that the brain of adult monkeys would be too "hard-wired" to gain a beneficial effect from the restoration of deficient pathways. The recent paper proves that gene therapy can be utilized in "middle aged" monkeys, and is not solely an avenue to be pursued during early development. This adds a lot of significance to work already begun in human patients, to restore an enzyme involved in a type of hereditary blindness.

Original Article:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08401.html

Gene therapy for red–green colour blindness in adult primates

Katherine Mancuso¹, William W. Hauswirth², Qiuhong Li², Thomas B. Connor³, James A. Kuchenbecker¹, Matthew C. Mauck³, Jay Neitz¹ & Maureen Neitz¹

Week of crap

So, a week of really crap lab results, or no results, triggered by continuous stuff-ups by myself. Intermixed with random bits of crap, my car overheating going down the M1 and me luckily pulling off (and noticing it) just before roadworks would have prevented stopping for about 5 kms. To top that off I was sick for a bit, but got over it pretty fast. The weekend was good, victory vs juventis friday night. Melb played better than expected though the end killed them with some awesome Juve' goals. Sat night was colonial tramcar restaurant with steph, Em and Seth. A little over-rated, but good nonetheless. Following this was casino, random walk across the city to get coffee and then chai back @ my place. sunday was a bit of shopping, and bunnings and using the BBQ to cook dinner (after buying gas from bunnings). So a decent end I guess... except for sunday's work (in between shops etc) and monday's work giving NO DAMN PROTEIN from my purification. argh!. I am use to things at least partially working lately.