Graaaaaaaad Skool
Sep. 16th, 2011 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanarillI am at it, although not yet in it. It is because there is some orientation-type stuff happening first, then classes/TAing/lab rotations start.
Today was (one half) of the incoming student symposium. I learned lots of stuff, so I will tell some highlights.
There was some stuff about C. elegans, which is used as a model organism for studying developmental stuff because it is a tiny little worm that develops quickly and the cellular lineage of every adult cell (there are not that many) is known. That's not what I want to do; it will bear fruit in the longer term, since studying it lets us know things about how cells differentiate and, eventually, how to reverse this 'irreversible' process. It appears from this study that the process which differentiates the cells into muscle cells and skin cells is not the same process which prevents the cells from being told to become something else. It's a neat bit of research, because it suggests that one system can be partially turned off without preventing wormy maturation, and allowing you to do some really strange things to the developing worms.
There was also some stuff about cilia, which are the kind of bacteria covered in little cilia hairs. The swim by moving the hairs back and forth, like little swimmy arms. Interestingly, they seem to have two nucleii. The micronucleus holds two copies of the raw, unusuable DNA, while the macronucleus holds forty-odd copies of the processed and usable DNA. Cilia are also bacteria that have sex, and I mean this in the meiosis-four daughter cell-gene mixing way. They also have seven possible "genders," which are determined by environmental factors during the growth of the daughter cells. (I say genders, but it's not really true. They're just chemical markers, but two cilia of the same gender will not mate. Apparently, this is to promote genetic diversity, since sister cells developing in the same place are more likely to be the same gender.) Oddly, cilia also reproduce in the simple binary fission route, but only if there's food. They have sex when they're starving XD
An interesting presentation was about some E. coli, which create these weird "poison on a stick" structures on their surface. The poison isn't a chemical, but a region that catalytically messes up other cells. Weirdly, the poison-stick is very specific, and will only poison other E. coli. And it's a really stupid weapon, because the gene that codes for any given poison also codes for the poison blocking protein; any colony of E. coli will all be essentially immune to each other. But there are up to eleven different variations of the poison part of the poison-on-a-stick, so depending on which poisons any given E. coli has active, they might be able to slow down or even kill their siblings. Because of the weird uselessness of this friend-killing device, it's now thought that it is some kind of very competitive communication. What strange things the bacteria are.
There was a presentation about ribosome rescue systems, which we well-regulated humans don't use as much but simple bacteria use all the time, srsly. Basically, sometimes in the middle of transcription, the bacterial RNA polymerase will just fall off the DNA. This creates a smaller mRNA, which in turn creates about half a protein. When the ribosome gets to the end, it being a stupid ribosome, it sits there going "? where is the rest? error does not compute error!" These rescue systems notice stuck ribosomes, release them, and also add a tag to the half-protein telling the cell it is useless garbage. We study it because cancer cells to make lots of garbage half-proteins (one of the reasons cancer cells suck up so much nutrient!) and being able to turn off the ribosome rescue means cancer cells have a lot more trouble making the working proteins they need, since all their riosomes are sitting there occupied with junk mRNAs going "? does not compute error."
Last presentation I will mention was about a protein called SNARE. SNARE is a trafficking protein, which grabs a nearby vesicle and pulls it near enough to the cell membrane to release the contents outside the cell. It is absolutely vital to thinking, since it releases chemicals across syntapctical spaces, for example. That part is simple and well-understood. The strange thing was that SNARE also had this weird tail-end region that is well defined but didn't seem to do anything. We know from experience that biology doesn't keep things that are useless, and especially not across species as diverse as rice and neon tetra fish. So it was doing something, and this study proved through a series of elegant experiments that I will not try to explain that the protein, in certain situations, breaks at an extremely conserved-across-species sequence, and then travels to the nucleus, where it turns genes on and off. We don't yet know which genes it turns on and off, but they suspect that it's part of a feedback loop. That is, the point here is to turn off the part of the cell machinery that is making and sending the signal, since it was already sent successfully; continuously sent neural signal results in what we like to call "a seizure." So yey that, because this research will probably bear fruit in the realm of chronic neurological dysfunction. Less crazy people all around \o/!
So, yeah. Grad skool. I think I am going to like it here :D
Today was (one half) of the incoming student symposium. I learned lots of stuff, so I will tell some highlights.
There was some stuff about C. elegans, which is used as a model organism for studying developmental stuff because it is a tiny little worm that develops quickly and the cellular lineage of every adult cell (there are not that many) is known. That's not what I want to do; it will bear fruit in the longer term, since studying it lets us know things about how cells differentiate and, eventually, how to reverse this 'irreversible' process. It appears from this study that the process which differentiates the cells into muscle cells and skin cells is not the same process which prevents the cells from being told to become something else. It's a neat bit of research, because it suggests that one system can be partially turned off without preventing wormy maturation, and allowing you to do some really strange things to the developing worms.
There was also some stuff about cilia, which are the kind of bacteria covered in little cilia hairs. The swim by moving the hairs back and forth, like little swimmy arms. Interestingly, they seem to have two nucleii. The micronucleus holds two copies of the raw, unusuable DNA, while the macronucleus holds forty-odd copies of the processed and usable DNA. Cilia are also bacteria that have sex, and I mean this in the meiosis-four daughter cell-gene mixing way. They also have seven possible "genders," which are determined by environmental factors during the growth of the daughter cells. (I say genders, but it's not really true. They're just chemical markers, but two cilia of the same gender will not mate. Apparently, this is to promote genetic diversity, since sister cells developing in the same place are more likely to be the same gender.) Oddly, cilia also reproduce in the simple binary fission route, but only if there's food. They have sex when they're starving XD
An interesting presentation was about some E. coli, which create these weird "poison on a stick" structures on their surface. The poison isn't a chemical, but a region that catalytically messes up other cells. Weirdly, the poison-stick is very specific, and will only poison other E. coli. And it's a really stupid weapon, because the gene that codes for any given poison also codes for the poison blocking protein; any colony of E. coli will all be essentially immune to each other. But there are up to eleven different variations of the poison part of the poison-on-a-stick, so depending on which poisons any given E. coli has active, they might be able to slow down or even kill their siblings. Because of the weird uselessness of this friend-killing device, it's now thought that it is some kind of very competitive communication. What strange things the bacteria are.
There was a presentation about ribosome rescue systems, which we well-regulated humans don't use as much but simple bacteria use all the time, srsly. Basically, sometimes in the middle of transcription, the bacterial RNA polymerase will just fall off the DNA. This creates a smaller mRNA, which in turn creates about half a protein. When the ribosome gets to the end, it being a stupid ribosome, it sits there going "? where is the rest? error does not compute error!" These rescue systems notice stuck ribosomes, release them, and also add a tag to the half-protein telling the cell it is useless garbage. We study it because cancer cells to make lots of garbage half-proteins (one of the reasons cancer cells suck up so much nutrient!) and being able to turn off the ribosome rescue means cancer cells have a lot more trouble making the working proteins they need, since all their riosomes are sitting there occupied with junk mRNAs going "? does not compute error."
Last presentation I will mention was about a protein called SNARE. SNARE is a trafficking protein, which grabs a nearby vesicle and pulls it near enough to the cell membrane to release the contents outside the cell. It is absolutely vital to thinking, since it releases chemicals across syntapctical spaces, for example. That part is simple and well-understood. The strange thing was that SNARE also had this weird tail-end region that is well defined but didn't seem to do anything. We know from experience that biology doesn't keep things that are useless, and especially not across species as diverse as rice and neon tetra fish. So it was doing something, and this study proved through a series of elegant experiments that I will not try to explain that the protein, in certain situations, breaks at an extremely conserved-across-species sequence, and then travels to the nucleus, where it turns genes on and off. We don't yet know which genes it turns on and off, but they suspect that it's part of a feedback loop. That is, the point here is to turn off the part of the cell machinery that is making and sending the signal, since it was already sent successfully; continuously sent neural signal results in what we like to call "a seizure." So yey that, because this research will probably bear fruit in the realm of chronic neurological dysfunction. Less crazy people all around \o/!
So, yeah. Grad skool. I think I am going to like it here :D
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 12:09 am (UTC)I'm actually very fond of your bacteria here, they seem kind of like they slow dog that is very fun to play with, but you have to keep reminding it you're there.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 08:58 pm (UTC)I'm glad to know that students of science are doing Good Things for the Benefit of Mankind, and not developing Mad Science for Chaos and Destruction like the rest of the internet community insists they are.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 04:43 am (UTC)They are not my bacteria. My bacteria were much more interesting, since they glowed when under UV light. This is just an interesting bacterial dynamic which might be implicated in the evolution of sexual organisms XD
no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 04:46 am (UTC)Well, some of it is Mad Science. I mean, things like this have direct applications, but the Thing With the Squid, while cool, doesn't seem to be very useful. And there is one professor here who seems to be attempting to find a way to grow flat screens for TVs. Pretty Mad, if you ask me XD
no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 08:43 pm (UTC)But they still aren't using their powers for Evil. That is good enough for me. XD