Slower than a snail

Research goes at a snail's pace. For every "discovery", there seems to be at least 10 setbacks. I guess if it worked every time we could just call it search instead of research. I have more Western blots to do this week. Hopefully I can get these last few blots wrapped up so that we can finally get this paper submitted. We are going to try to get it published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC). I have my doubts that we will be successful getting it into JBC but it is good research so hopefully we will have a chance. Journals are rated first tier, second tier, or third tier (not offically, though) depending on the influence of the journal. Journals like Science and Nature are considered tier 1+, JBC, the American Journal of Physiology, Cell, and the like are considered tier 1 journals and on down from there. I don't like a lot of what comes out of Science and Nature because these are the breaking reseach stories and due to space limitations, I can never get all the information I want. Also, in the excitement to publish ground breaking research before someone else does, the experiment(s) is not repeated as often as it should be. This leads to retractions. There are probably more retractions in Science than any other journal. Having said that, retractions are still few and far in between.

I won't get much done today. I attended a funeral this morning for a friend that died last week. I am glad I got to go but I just don't have the time I need to run another gel. Hopefully I will get the rest of the blots run this week so that I can move on. I have some cloning that I need to do. It has been hanging over my head for months. When it works, its great but when it doesn't it is very frustrating. One simple base pair misalignment and the whole thing goes down the drain.