MIA

I’ve been having a hard time finding time to blog recently. Mostly, I get up in the morning, go through my morning hygiene regimen, eat breakfast, go to lab, come home, eat something small, take a shower and go to bed. That doesn’t leave much time for blogging. I was thinking about this the other day (albeit in the context of why other knitters are able to complete a sweater in a reasonable amount of time) wondering how anyone ever managed to even do laundry when I realized that most normal people have several hours between the time they get home and the time they go to bed. I vaguely remember when that was true for me, too, but I think it’s going to be awhile before I get back to that sort of sane schedule.

One disadvantage to being a scientist in the molecular biosciences is that it is virtually impossible to stop in the middle of an experiment due to the fragile nature of our samples. In some experiments, there are certain defined stopping points, but you really cannot stop until you get to one. It’s a bit like making cookies. You can freeze cookie batter, but it’s better if you finish adding all of the ingredients and mixing and so on before you freeze it. This is very comparable to my labwork because I am often freezing things (or putting them into the fridge) until the next day.

Anyhoo, the immunofluorescence experiments I’ve been doing have required that I grow my cells in special conditions for 8 hours, then start four hours of work. I can’t grow the cells for longer than 8 hours or I might have them grow overnight which would make things easier. No, I must grow them for 8 hours, then incubate them in fixative for 2 hours, then spend another hour preparing them for the antibody incubation and then I can stop until the next day. And, I always I think to myself, I’m going to go home for an hour or two in the afternoon before I start the fixation, or for dinner during the fixation, but I get busy doing other stuff and I never manage to take a break.

Anyway, the bottom line is, posting may be scarce until I get these particular experiments behind me.

Lab update 3-1-08

Mostly, I have been working on immunofluorescence experiments and taking pictures of same. I’ve actually gotten some pretty good images of my experiments and that makes me very happy. I now have good images for:

Figure 1A: Panels 2 and 3
Figure 2B: Panels 1, 2 and 3

There’s still a lot left for me to do, though. Unfortunately, I’m still having problems with the deconvolution software. Fortunately (?) I’m not the only one having problems. While this is definitely inconvenient, at least it means that it’s not just something I’m doing wrong or that my images are too sucky to deconvolve (actually, they look much better before I try to deconvolve them). Importantly, the other person who is having problems with the software said that it was working fine several weeks ago, but is now causing problems. Hopefully, it can be fixed because it’s pretty expensive software.

Anyhow, for now, I’m not doing the deconvolution and the images look fine so I’m going to set up the figures with the images that I have.