![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
At suicide bike path wars. (And also the Game. And now so have you.) My bruises are all turning green now. As bike path collisions go, it was pretty mild. No one got road rash or broke a bone or anything, so it was a "good" collision. But now I am turning green XD
Today I shelled out some monies for Burt's Bees hand cream, which I pln to use on my body, and also some leave-in hair treatment. The hand cream makes my skin stop being painful and cracking, and makes my hands smell like almonds. The hair treatment, which I thought would make my hair all greasy, instead makes it soft and less frizzy for the first time in . . . ever. Trufax: when they speak of "moisture-starved" body parts, like skin and hair, they do not mean water. They mean oil. Which is to say, all I need to have been doing is putting oil in my hair. Who knew?
Finally, today the biochemistry techniques class starts to pay off. This is not the only class I have taken for a week or week-and-a-half of the overall course length, but is undoubtedly the first where I learned nothing until this point. Anyway, today we started learned about antibodies, which aside from making great drugs are the most useful biochemical technique since the invention of PCR*. I will only explain how it works generally.
In general, we take something to which we want an antibody, called the antigen, and inject it into a small animal, like a rabbit. After a few weeks, so the rabbit's immune system has had time to make a response, we draw a little blood. There is antibody in the blood, which we purify out. Now we have antigen specific antibody! \o/ To make lots of antigen specific antibody, we take some B-cells from the small animal, and fuse them to cancer cells that live in test tubes. The fused cells produce lots of antibodies because they are B-cells, and because they are cancerous they are immortal - they can live in a test tube producing antibody forever and ever.
Why do we want it? For starters, they make great detectors. If we have an antibody to a thing we think is on our gel, and it all sticks to one place on the gel, we can determine that it is there, and also where. We can also use them to "fish" for protein interactions, which is a topic I know only a little about right now, so I'll explain at a later date. Finally, remember that antibody-based drug. We need antibodies that stick to the messed-up-cancer-protein-target, and only to the messed-up-cancer-protein-target, for it to work. This is how we get such antibodies. Which means, in a practical sense, that we cure cancer in the body by making use of cancer in little test tubes. Mmm, taste the irony!
And that is your science! for today.
*Which allows you start with a tiiiiiiny bit of DNA and end with more than 1000000000000 times as much as you started with. It is how you get useful amount of DNA off of hair follicles or blood samples left at a crime scene, for example.
Today I shelled out some monies for Burt's Bees hand cream, which I pln to use on my body, and also some leave-in hair treatment. The hand cream makes my skin stop being painful and cracking, and makes my hands smell like almonds. The hair treatment, which I thought would make my hair all greasy, instead makes it soft and less frizzy for the first time in . . . ever. Trufax: when they speak of "moisture-starved" body parts, like skin and hair, they do not mean water. They mean oil. Which is to say, all I need to have been doing is putting oil in my hair. Who knew?
Finally, today the biochemistry techniques class starts to pay off. This is not the only class I have taken for a week or week-and-a-half of the overall course length, but is undoubtedly the first where I learned nothing until this point. Anyway, today we started learned about antibodies, which aside from making great drugs are the most useful biochemical technique since the invention of PCR*. I will only explain how it works generally.
In general, we take something to which we want an antibody, called the antigen, and inject it into a small animal, like a rabbit. After a few weeks, so the rabbit's immune system has had time to make a response, we draw a little blood. There is antibody in the blood, which we purify out. Now we have antigen specific antibody! \o/ To make lots of antigen specific antibody, we take some B-cells from the small animal, and fuse them to cancer cells that live in test tubes. The fused cells produce lots of antibodies because they are B-cells, and because they are cancerous they are immortal - they can live in a test tube producing antibody forever and ever.
Why do we want it? For starters, they make great detectors. If we have an antibody to a thing we think is on our gel, and it all sticks to one place on the gel, we can determine that it is there, and also where. We can also use them to "fish" for protein interactions, which is a topic I know only a little about right now, so I'll explain at a later date. Finally, remember that antibody-based drug. We need antibodies that stick to the messed-up-cancer-protein-target, and only to the messed-up-cancer-protein-target, for it to work. This is how we get such antibodies. Which means, in a practical sense, that we cure cancer in the body by making use of cancer in little test tubes. Mmm, taste the irony!
And that is your science! for today.
*Which allows you start with a tiiiiiiny bit of DNA and end with more than 1000000000000 times as much as you started with. It is how you get useful amount of DNA off of hair follicles or blood samples left at a crime scene, for example.
