First post

Where to start? I have chosen to call this blog SECular Thoughts. This is a bit of an inside joke. My graduate research involves proteins in the yeast secretory pathway. These proteins are Sec16 and Sec12. In yeast, a gene name is in all caps and from that I get the SEC in SECular Thoughts (gene names are also italicized but I couldn’t figure out how to make the header do that, sorry). Feel free to groan at the pun.

This is not my first blogging experience. I’ve been playing around with blogs for awhile and have kept a knitting blog and a personal blog. Both of those have been good experiences for me. Now, I want to blog a bit more seriously about science and what it’s like working in a lab. I am on my way to a science blogging conference and so it seemed that now was a good time to start a new blog.

I am currently a graduate student at a large research university in the Midwest. I am hoping to graduate fairly soon. Considering I’m in my eighth year of graduate school (!), it would be surprising if I wasn’t hoping to graduate soon. At any rate, much of my life is consumed with doing the experiments that will get me my thesis material that will get me my degree, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll actually have to blog. Right now, I’m aiming for at least one post a week (I find it better to aim low and be pleasantly surprised when things go better than to aim high and be disappointed).

The image found in the banner is a photograph of some of my yeast cells. It is typical of the type of data I collect in my experiments. In this image, there are actually about 20 cells (you can’t see the outlines of the cells because of the type of light I am shining on the cells). In these cells, Sec16 is fused to green fluorescent protein (GFP) while Sec12 is in red (the way I get Sec12 to look red is a little complicated). One way you can determine that there are several cells in the photo is that each ring of Sec12 represents one cell (not because it’s defining the boundary of the cell but because it’s in a circle around the nucleus of the cell and there is only one nucleus per cell). Each cell only has a few of the green spots. This is because Sec16 is found only in certain places in the cell. Normally, Sec12 would perfectly co-localize with Sec16 (that is, it would be found in red spots and these spots would overlap the green spots), however, these cells are actually overexpressing Sec12 (that is, making much more of it than it normally would). When I overexpress Sec12 in these cells, it becomes delocalized–it is found in regions different from the ones you normally see it in.