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

First Post! Huzzah!

Hi, world! I'm sitting at the Advanced Photon Source, a giant circular particle accelerator in Lemont, IL. At about midnight, I'll start bombarding my sample with enough X-rays to kill a man in a millisecond.


(<- My workstation!)

The (perpetual) goal is to measure the melting temperature of potassium at high (>50GPa = ~500,000atm) pressures. Then, I'm off to Johnson Space Center to image semi-mythical dust structure in argon plasma in ZERO GRAVITY with the Yale Drop Team. Afterward, I'll set up camp at Caltech to study stability of ice/rock mixtures with application to Titan. My PI, Prof. David Stevenson, once proposed using a bunch of nuclear weapons to open a crack in Earth's crust to send a probe to the core. I won't be working on that, sadly.