Scientific Romance

One of the odd habits my lab homies and I engage in is trying to make up names for scientific romance novels. You know, the type of novels you see at the grocery store with titles like "Unbridled Passions" and the picture of a cowboy on it and some chick with her shirt ripped half off. Like those, but with science. Our current favorites are:

"As the Centrifuge Turns." (-may be better as a soap opera)
"Bunsen's Flames." (-Retrospective Fake-Historical)
"Hot Reactions". (-For the PG-13 set)
"Precipitating Evening " (One-night stand)
"Le Volatile" (Artsy soft-core)

Our #1 ranked title is.........................

"Scintillating Encounters."

[crickets] See, because of the Scintillation Count-er. Get it? eh? [/crickets]

Anyone got a title they want to share? I wanna see!

Faculty of 1000

I love Faculty of 1000. I really, really do. It's a fabulous resource for a variety of situations. Say, hypothetically you have to write a paper about a journal article for a class, with the only restrictions being that the article you select should be "good", "about biophysics," "maybe have some kind of tech advance", and "not be about anything in your field". (In my case, no "proteins, nucleic acids, crystal structures, or EPR." *sob*) Also, let's say that hypothetically you've been procrastinating on the paper because of benchwork catastrophes [1] A, B, &C and the really cool visiting speaker, and... yeah. So now you have to find a "good" paper meeting certain criteria and you don't have time to sift through all of PubMed. Worry not! Faculty of 1000 will help you find a great paper with a "tech advance" stamp, and it's very easy to sort through various topics. The downside being, every time I go to the website I keep getting sidetracked by -oh, that looks cool, or hmm, is that a technique I could use, or wow, I should really read that! Then I download about 50 PDFs to throw in my "interesting papers to read" folder where they may never be seen again.

[1] S.W.A.M. always says I shouldn't call it a catastrophe unless "Something important is on fire, someone ends up in the hospital, something worth over $5000 is broken, or it sets you back more than 3 months; so don't be so melodramatic!" For the record, all of the above have happened to me at some point during grad school. During such catastrophes, I am incapable of using words as long as catastrophe, so I use it when I can. Fortunately, none of these have happened recently. Unfortunately, that means it's only a matter of time. Once, two of the above were simultaneous. Guess which two for 100 points.

Return of Macromolecule Monday-RFP!

I know this is like, so three months ago, but I wanted to clear up any misconceptions about "Radioactive cheezeburgers".

Kittehs from various news sources, RFP rendered by moi in Pymol from:

Wall, M.A., Socolich, M., Ranganathan, R. (2000) The structural basis for red fluorescence in the tetrameric GFP homolog DsRed. Nat.Struct.Biol. 7: 1133-1138

PDB id: 1ggx

Rapid Communication

From the "I need to get out more" department, the header for this paper has had me laughing all day. Yes, I know better, but I keep getting mental images of wired-up rats operating telegraph machines with their brains.

SOS! Is anyone listening! Help! We are trapped in a lab with a bunch of weird humans! We are out of cheese! Help!

Yes, I know this is a good and serious paper with patch clamps and electro-chemistry and cell-culture and math and physics and all those lovely and serious things. But the circuit diagrams aren't helping.

Repeat: We are trapped in a lab and we are out of cheese!

I think my brain is trying to defend itself because every time I read about interfacing living cells with circuits directly, it kinda creeps me out. Some people are weirded out by needles or snakes, I am squicked by phrases like "Field-effect transistors form spontaneously capacitive junctions with cultured cells from rat brains." That's just how I roll. It is a cool paper, though.

Citation:
Neurons from rat brain coupled to transistors
S. Vassanelli, P. Fromherz
Appl. Phys. A 65, 85–88 (1997)

Friday Fun - Science Music Video Doubleshot

First, the Black Knight alerted me to this lovely transformation rap by the Notorious GFP

"we gonna inject dna cuz its your birthday,
so every single day we transform DNA
I'm packing two fiddy micros into my Gilson,
aw my baby mama's calling but I know he ain't my real son
im a OG playa dont mean to sound crude,
But I only took one shot in her eppendorf tube, (whooo)"

How True.

Also, I would like to share one of my personal favorites, this fabulous We Are the World parody/PCR love song by Bio-Rad, because the above verse reminded me of the following line:

"PCR-when you need to find out who the daddy is..."

The molecular biologists in my department have been spontaneously been bursting into this song about once a day for the last month. Seriously.

Macromolecule Monday

Today's Macromolecule Monday has an Easter theme with delicious and useful Ovalbumin.

As usual, rendered in Pymol, Coordinates from the PDB courtesy of :

Crystal structure of uncleaved ovalbumin at 1.95 A resolution., Stein PE, Leslie AG, Finch JT, Carrell RW, J Mol Biol. 1991 Oct 5;221(3):941-59. PMID:1942038

Notes passed in Seminar

"Tonight's feature horror film: ATTACK OF THE NUCLEOPHILES!!! News at 11."

Macromolecule Monday

BFF hemoglobin!!! (Deoxy conformation).

Uploaded to the PDB by Brucker, E.A.

Caption by (I really need to get out of the lab more, halp!)

And yes, I belatedly realized that last week's macromolecule is much more appropriate for today. Oh well. Happy St. Pats! Go drink something green.

MacroMolecule Monday

This is most college students' savior : Alcohol Dehydrogenase.

Please don't fire me for the bad pun in the post title.

Rendered in PyMol, caption by sleep deprivation.

Coordinates downloaded from the PDB, courtesy of :

Al-Karadaghi, S., Cedergren-Zeppezauer, E.S., Hovmoller, S. (1994) Refined crystal structure of liver alcohol dehydrogenase-NADH complex at 1.8 A resolution. Acta Crystallogr.,Sect.D 50: 793-807

Crystal Structure Rorschach Fun!

What does this look like to you? BFF Post-Doc says hedge clippers or salad tongs. I am certain it looks mostly like a butterfly. We nearly came to blows over the issue. (OK, not really.) Is crystal structure Rorschach a common obsessional phenomenon like looking for words in protein sequences and gene names that spell or sound like dirty words? Or is it just the geeks in my lab that do this? I wonder.