gram Positive

Weekend meditation: So, what is it you do here?

Peter — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:26:12 +0000

The question about our work that I most often have trouble answering is not complicated. Any 5-year-old will ask this about everything: “Why?” Typically, I don’t think about my work at that 30,000 ft. level. When asked, I will stumble and mutter something about ‘protein machines control everything in life’ and: ‘You never know what piece of basic research is going to pan out into something Nobel Prize-worthy or pardigm-denting. After all, RNAi started out as an un-mappable allele that affects vulva development in a 959-cell worm.

I have to come up with a better, well-rehearsed, non-bullshit answer. I need to have it stored and ready in at least 4 forms: one for the non-scientist, one for the non-biologist, one for the biologist non-microbiologist (my typial speaking audience), and one for the microbiologists. This is going to be important for both maintaining my own sanity and as practice in communicating my work to the public. I will post the results Monday.

Today I will spend this lovely summer day in the lab, watching cells sporulate. If I had this to do all over again, I would have begun this project by figuring out how to automate the process. But now in order to make all of our data congruent I have to keep going at it this way. Unfortunately, this way takes about 14 hours per experiment. And, I have to do about 30 of them in dupicate.

Fun fun.

Shadows in the Palace

Peter — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:36:41 +0000

I have never felt luckier not to be a 16th century Korean court maid than I do now, after viewing ‘Shadows in the Palace’ at the New York Asian Film Festival. Recommended. The festival itself runs through July 4 and is lots of fun. I have yet to be disappointed in anything I have seen at the NYAFF.

Greetings globe!

Peter — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:53:13 +0000

This first long-delayed post is brought to you by bacteriophage, which, I assume, lysed my cultures and freed me from 10 hours of watching B. subtilis sporulate under the microscope. I am a Ph.D student in my 4th year at the Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at New York University in New York City. This will be a live research and commentary blog inspired by the blogs of Rosie Redfield’s lab and Moselio Shaechter’s excellent blog ‘Small Things Considered’.

I will post more of an introduction to our research soon. I am a student of Patrick Eichenberger and am studying the assembly of the spore coat of Bacillus subtilis.

B. subtilis is a bacterium and forms spores capable of surviving indefinitely in response to starvation. These spores are resistant to heat, chemicals and predation and may be the most durable form of life on earth, and perhaps, in space. The spore coat provides some of these protective qualities and is critical to the overall viability of the spore. It is an extremely complex protein machine made up of at least 70 proteins and covers the outer surface of the spherical spore. More information will follow but for an idea of where we are at, have a look at a poster I presented at the 2007 Molecular Genetics of Bacteria and Phages conference in Madison, Wisconsin.