Progress

It's been a good week in the lab. I have had a couple of successful Western blots but am not sure what the results mean in the overall picture. Our hypothesis was that there is increased signaling in our tumor cells compared to normal tissue but that doesn't appear to be the case. We are making that observation after ensuring that there are equal amounts of the non-activated protein in each experiment. That, in and of itself may be faulty. I have found that even within the tumor samples, there is a lot of variation in the amounts of overall protein expressed. Perhaps the amplitude of growth promoting signals is controlled by the amount of signaling proteins available to be activated rather than just the amount of activation of the existing pool of proteins as is the accepted dogma. That would be pretty inefficient and not very likely but it certainly can't be discounted without further examination.

I am getting ready to perform a mutagenesis experiment next week. Oddly enough, I need to mutate a mutant plasmid to a wild type plasmid. Essentially is it like picking one letter out of a page in a book, erasing it, and putting in a new letter. Next, you put the letter in the context of a few of the surrounding words on another piece of paper and then hand that piece of paper and the orginal page to someone and tell them to insert your change onto a fresh page and make millions of copies. I really hope it works. I really need this wild type plasmid to continue on with some experiments that we have going.

Can I get worker's comp for allergies???

After the last year or so of scratchy eyes, runny nose, and sneezing fits almost every time I do a rat surgery, I have come to realize that I probably have a low grade allergy to rats. That is not good. I make my living working with rodents. Yesterday, I came in (yes, I was laboring on Labor Day) to do some surgeries and sure enough my nose started running and my eyes started to itch. It wasn't too bad but enough to notice. This morning, I went into the Animal Care Unit to check on my rats and my body went crazy. I couldn't stop sneezing. I probably lost a pound of snot and the only reason I can still see is that I was smart enough to wear my glasses this morning instead of my contacts. Without my glasses, my fingers would have had free access to my eyes and they would probably both still be in the animal care facility. Later, I ran into a friend of mine and casually mentioned the incident. He just smiled and in a stuffed voice somewhat similar to mine offered me some sudafed. Apparently, the same thing happened to him this morning. Thankfully, the rate at which my trash can is filling with used tissues is slowing.