Brains, Babies, and.....Lasers

Hello friends! I am currently working in the Child Study Center, specifically, in the Child Neuroscience Lab under Dr. Kevin Pelphrey. What my lab does is use fMRI, eye-tracking, and fNIRS (Near-InfraRed Spectroscopy) to monitor the comparative brain states of children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorders. There are a few areas we're particularly interested in: the Superior Temporal Sulcus, the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, the Fusiform Face Area, and the Amygdala stand out particularly well. I'm also experimenting with the NIRS device, which fires lasers into the brain and then delivers a cortical image with the temporal resolution of an EEG, and a spatial resolution that's significantly higher than said device. I'm also helping out with some experiments and coding eye-tracking for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I'll never be able to watch that movie the same way again.

Displayed here are some photos of what I do...generally speaking. And the brain is mine; no HIPAA violations for me!

Sad Science

Sometimes you have lots of protein, and then it degrades over the course of your purification, and then you have no protein. And then you are sad because you don't have anything to present on lab meeting on Monday other than complete and utter failure. and dispair. and sadness. and tears. maybe I will take pictures of my tears instead of my failed gels.
Also, I would like to point out that biology is epically winning the poll right now. However, if you combine biology and chemistry and physics into 'biophysics and biochemistry' it would TOTALLY dominate over say, geoscience. Just sayin.
Well, I'm taking the weekend off from my scientific failures and I'm going to Vienna. I will eat cake and be happy.
-Julia

Turtles! Ducks! Stability of Ice/Rock Mixtures with Application to Titan!

Hello Adoring Fans! Let me tell you a story. About 4.55 billion years ago, in a spinning disk/cloud of dust, gas, and other stuff, our solar system began to form. The sun turned on. C1 chondrites (awesome meteorites) condensed, preserving a key to the bulk elemental composition of the solar system. About 30-50 million years later, something about the size of Mars slammed into the proto-Earth, fucking melting the shit out of everything and flinging a cloud of debris into space that eventually condensed into our Moon. But before that, in the vicinity of Saturn, something very special was happening. Titan, the second largest satellite in the Solar System and currently the only celestial body in the Solar System besides Earth to have large, stable bodies of liquid on its surface, began to form out of various bodies with inhomogeneous density. Various processes occurred, driven by the relative densities of ice/rock mixtures within the planet and by the ability of convection to remove radiogenic heat. Recent measurements of Titan's gravitational field (gathered by Doppler Tracking the Cassini spacecraft during a few flybys) allowed the determination of it's moment of inertia coefficient. Like Callisto (but unlike Ganymede!), Titan is incompletely differentiated. That is, unlike Earth, its deep interior does not feature defined layers with distinct composition (iron-rich core and silicate mantle in the Earth, in contrast). So, there's probably a layer of intermixed ice and rock.

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? IS THIS CONFIGURATION STABLE?!?!?!?!? WHAT CONSTRAINTS DOES THIS PLACE ON THE CONDITIONS OF ITS ACCRETION?!?!?!?!!?

I DON'T KNOW I DON'T KNOW I'VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR TWO DAYS STOP YELLING PLEAZE.

But before classes start, I will have something coherent to say.

And possibly pictures of a gathering of infinite turtles.

Yes.

Oh PS - I'm working at CalTech now. It's very pretty here. Lots of sunshine and palm trees and turtles. Have I mentioned the turtles? I saw two ducks today too. They appeared to be friends with the turtles. Turtles! It's turtles all the way down!

Less science this time.

Katie wants a summary of my science with less science. I think less science means less awesome... but whatever.

1) Sometimes DNA gets messed up, like by UV light, which is why you should wear sunscreen.
2) Cells have proteins that fix the DNA. When those proteins don't work, you either age really fast, or get cancer all over.
3) I'm studying one of those proteins, called XPD. I'm trying to purify it, and make crystals of it, so I can take a picture of it, and thereby see how it works.
4) There were small children in lab coats in the lab today.

:)

Proteins!

Hey!
I'm in Germany doing structural biology research, which is exceedingly awesome. I've been working in the lab for 2 weeks so far, and have run 3 columns, and 3 gels. I have also grown 48L of bacteria. Goopy.
Basically, I'm trying to figure out the structure of a protein called XPD, which is a 5'-3' DNA helicase involved in DNA repair pathways. It is a component of TFIIH, so its presence is also required for general transcription. When this protein gets screwed up, there are 3 possible diseases that can result depending on exactly how the protein is damaged - XP, characterized by extreme sensitivity to UV light because the cells can't repair the DNA when the UV light makes photodimers (wear sunscreen!), CS/XP, which has XP symptoms along with developmental defects, and then TTD, characterized by premature aging - this happens when XPD is so damaged that it can't form a complex with the rest of TFIIH, and transcription in general is impaired.
So, it would be cool to figure out how the protein works, how different mutations lead to the different disease phenotypes, etc.
Three structures of the protein in different archaeal organisms have been solved, and I'm trying to get the protein from a different archaea, purify it, and crystallize it with DNA (which hasn't been done yet) to see it in action. End result, if everything goes perfectly and I don't light any fires, will be a pretty 3D structure of the protein.
I'll also get to learn how to do some really cool biophysics techniques, like using fluorescence anisotropy to see DNA binding, ITC to measure heats of binding and binding constants... this summer will be most excellent. :D

Biology makes the world go round

Hey world,

I'm in New Haven, in our own wonderful Bass center on Science Hill, working in Prof. Hochstrasser's lab. His lab studies protein degradation - the pathways and mechanisms that function in our cells when misfolded, mutated, or regulatory proteins need to be degraded. I'm looking at 3 proteins that are targeted by the enzyme Doa10 and get degraded by the endoplasmic reticulum associated degradation (ERAD) pathway in yeast, specifically trying to figure out how the degradation signals of these proteins are associated with the membrane of the ER, if at all. Application: none yet, but interestingly enough the same pathway is at work in cystic fibrosis.

After 4.5 weeks of growing out my yeast strains, screwing it up, repeating, and running some controls - I'm finally starting my experiment tomorrow!!

-Liya

AUVs!

hey team!

I'm chillin at Woods Hole, and I don't really have tons of time to write this, as I'm in the middle of work, but here's a quick update.

I'm working with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). This lab has worked with both floats and buoyancy-driven gliders, with a recent emphasis on the gliders. There aren't too many other labs out there using arrays of AUVs like this for science (the standard customers for the companies building these AUVs are the Navy and other defense organizations), so it's pretty new stuff, and super interesting. I've been working with two new propellor-driven gliders that they recently bought: these guys are about 2-3m long and can swim at about 1-2 m/s for 8ish hours. So far, I've been messing around in Matlab, working on a tracking interface for the gliders that we can use after deploying them in the field. It looks like we're going to test it out at the beach on Friday! I'll give a better update once this program is [mostly] finished and I start working more with the vehicles.

Anyways, here's a quick shot of my lab.

Sorry Joe, but my view wins. See ya in Houston :)

-- M