school is getting closer and closer to being cool
Figured that enough things have accumulated to write about. Actually, not really,but it's about time to write.
I declared my major, finally, after a great amount of procrastination. Apparently I'm the fourth student to declare a major on the track I'm declaring.
Also, I got older, and the birthday was marked by an earthquake at 2AM here in Berkeley. If that's not a sign, I don't know what it is. Although a sign of what is a more debatable matter. Hopefully an earthshakingly good year and not like a natural disaster sort of year. I spent the day relaxing and not doing too much homework. A lot of reading. I'm most of the way through "Wicked," the book by MacGuire upon which the musical is based. The book is very different from the musical. The musical's atmosphere is entirely different than what you read in the book. The book is well done (thus far) though a great deal less G-rated than the musical.
Classes are getting really interesting. We're currently programming in MIPS assembly now which can be translated directly into machine code. It's very exciting to be able to look at a string of ones and zeros and know what they're supposed to do.
The new genetics professor is a very very good speaker. He's Russian with a British accent, which may have something to do with it. Also, he likes to reference literature and artwork in
his lectures and actually talks about the process of discovery and experimentation. A book he highly recommends (and a postdoc in lab) is "Eighth Day of Creation," and the excerpts he's taken from it sound pretty engaging. Yesterday Dr. Ian Wilmut, they guy who ...I'm not sure what the appropriate word it here, but I'm just going to use "made"...Dolly came and gave a talk. It was cool to have someone like that come talk to us, but to be honest, he is not that great of a speaker, and I would have preferred another lecture from our normal professor. It was interesting to here about how sheep labs work. Unlike frogs, they have a very specific mating season that starts around now and ends, I believe, in Jan. or Feb. They have to plan out all the experiments they're going to do during the mating season in advance and once they start, they can't really deviate. And on top of that, they have to work in a lab on a farm. And they have to buy a lot of sheep. Frogs really are convenient.
Oh! And we learned about this really cool experiment in biochem (skip this part if you can't stand bio):
An ATP synthase (aka ATPase) is a transmembrane enzyme that has a rotating part and a stationary part. There is a good picture here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATP_synthase. The stationary part consists of a ring of alpha and beta subunits on one side of the membrane which is attached to a delta subunit which is actually partially embedded into the membrane. Inside the ring of alpha and beta subunits is the gamma subunit which is basically a spinning rotor. Attached to the gamma is a ring of C subunits which spin the gamma subunit. This is a pretty complicated enzyme. I don't think we actually know the whole structure yet. So this group in Japan wanted to prove that the enzyme really works by rotating. What they did was change the DNA sequence so that the stationary part (specifically the beta-subunits) had histidine tails conjugated to them. Histidine will bind to nickel, so they stuck them onto a nickel coated slide. Also, what they did was attach a long flouescent actin molecule to the spinning part so they could see it under a microscope. How they did this was to engineer out all the cysteines except for one on the spinning part. Cysteine can easily be attached to a molecule called biotin, which can then be attached to a molecule called avidin to which a long flourescent actin molecule is attached. Then they could watch under a microscope this flourescing actin fiber twirl. And in fact, so can you! (http://www.res.titech.ac.jp/~seibutu/ has links to some short movies as well as a diagram which make the experiment more clear.) Talk about a heroic amount of effort. Later they also showed that the rotor twirls in the other direction for catalysis in the opposite direction. Isn't that SO COOL!?! Aboslutely amazing, I tell you, amazing.
I declared my major, finally, after a great amount of procrastination. Apparently I'm the fourth student to declare a major on the track I'm declaring.
Also, I got older, and the birthday was marked by an earthquake at 2AM here in Berkeley. If that's not a sign, I don't know what it is. Although a sign of what is a more debatable matter. Hopefully an earthshakingly good year and not like a natural disaster sort of year. I spent the day relaxing and not doing too much homework. A lot of reading. I'm most of the way through "Wicked," the book by MacGuire upon which the musical is based. The book is very different from the musical. The musical's atmosphere is entirely different than what you read in the book. The book is well done (thus far) though a great deal less G-rated than the musical.
Classes are getting really interesting. We're currently programming in MIPS assembly now which can be translated directly into machine code. It's very exciting to be able to look at a string of ones and zeros and know what they're supposed to do.
The new genetics professor is a very very good speaker. He's Russian with a British accent, which may have something to do with it. Also, he likes to reference literature and artwork in
his lectures and actually talks about the process of discovery and experimentation. A book he highly recommends (and a postdoc in lab) is "Eighth Day of Creation," and the excerpts he's taken from it sound pretty engaging. Yesterday Dr. Ian Wilmut, they guy who ...I'm not sure what the appropriate word it here, but I'm just going to use "made"...Dolly came and gave a talk. It was cool to have someone like that come talk to us, but to be honest, he is not that great of a speaker, and I would have preferred another lecture from our normal professor. It was interesting to here about how sheep labs work. Unlike frogs, they have a very specific mating season that starts around now and ends, I believe, in Jan. or Feb. They have to plan out all the experiments they're going to do during the mating season in advance and once they start, they can't really deviate. And on top of that, they have to work in a lab on a farm. And they have to buy a lot of sheep. Frogs really are convenient.
Oh! And we learned about this really cool experiment in biochem (skip this part if you can't stand bio):
An ATP synthase (aka ATPase) is a transmembrane enzyme that has a rotating part and a stationary part. There is a good picture here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATP_synthase. The stationary part consists of a ring of alpha and beta subunits on one side of the membrane which is attached to a delta subunit which is actually partially embedded into the membrane. Inside the ring of alpha and beta subunits is the gamma subunit which is basically a spinning rotor. Attached to the gamma is a ring of C subunits which spin the gamma subunit. This is a pretty complicated enzyme. I don't think we actually know the whole structure yet. So this group in Japan wanted to prove that the enzyme really works by rotating. What they did was change the DNA sequence so that the stationary part (specifically the beta-subunits) had histidine tails conjugated to them. Histidine will bind to nickel, so they stuck them onto a nickel coated slide. Also, what they did was attach a long flouescent actin molecule to the spinning part so they could see it under a microscope. How they did this was to engineer out all the cysteines except for one on the spinning part. Cysteine can easily be attached to a molecule called biotin, which can then be attached to a molecule called avidin to which a long flourescent actin molecule is attached. Then they could watch under a microscope this flourescing actin fiber twirl. And in fact, so can you! (http://www.res.titech.ac.jp/~seibutu/ has links to some short movies as well as a diagram which make the experiment more clear.) Talk about a heroic amount of effort. Later they also showed that the rotor twirls in the other direction for catalysis in the opposite direction. Isn't that SO COOL!?! Aboslutely amazing, I tell you, amazing.
posted by teabag | 11:09 AM
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