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.