Pretty pictures, pretty movies

Where else can you get to see beautiful images and movies other than in biology?

Here’s an image of cytoskeleton that you can just keep staring at:

Red – actin filaments, Green – Microtubules, Blue – nuclei

These filamentous structures (microtubules and actin) are not complete without a set of proteins called motor proteins. These proteins are great transporters in cells. Simply put, they pick up the cargo that has to be transported, hitch hike on these filaments and deliver the cargo to their destinations. And why do we need such a well developed mechanism – One good reason is the need for speed. The cytoplasm is a viscoelastic material and if stuff were to be moved within the cell from one end to the other just by random diffusion and no directed motion at all (as we see on these tracks), one can imagine how inefficient that would be.

Here’s one of my first movies (yay!) that I took in this current lab that I’m rotating. Its kinesin moving on Microtubules. Microtubules have a + end and a – end and the kinesin that I am studying moves towards the + end. Its easy to see which is the + end of the microtubule as you see bright spots of concentrated kinesins at these ends.

An eel that’s not an eel: Electric eel

I’ve heard of this creature before a few years back but I don’t think I bothered to find out more about it back then. All I knew was that its an electric fish (yes, a fish and not an eel; makes me wonder why its called that way though) which produces electricity.

Every single cell generates about 0.1V and several thousands of cells in series and parallel could generate about 500V of electricity. That’s an overwhelming amount of electric power from an organism. One could imagine number of potential applications if we could build cells which could replicate the electrical nature of these cells. Not to my surprise, I found this work done by researchers at Yale University where they tried to build something of this sort which I’m yet to read up thoroughly.

I googled for something which had the words electricity, proteins, cytoskeleton, cells (related to my research work) and one of the sites listed had this video and hence this post today.

Its interesting how people came up with such neat videos back in the 50s which didn’t see much of the digital advancements. Infact this seems so much better than some of the videos we get today. Turns out that Moody Institute of Science made several such educational/science videos of exceptional quality back in the 50’s and 60’s. Take a look at this and I’m sure you’d want to watch more of their videos.

The Double Helix

Sometime in my junior year of undergrad, I borrowed this book ‘The Double Helix’ by James Watson from a good friend of mine. That was the time when I think I really got to appreciate some of the coursework we were doing back then, not to mention that I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a pretty well known piece of work and yes, its known for some good as well as bad reasons. So why am I talking about this today, here?

I saw an undergrad in the library reading this book. I got really excited seeing this as it reminded me how much of a delight it was to me reading this book. The person that I am, I couldn’t help but just start talking to him. Andy, freshman was only halfway through and I didn’t want to spoil it for him.

If you haven’t read this book yet, I strongly recommend it. The best part being even if you don’t have enough background to understand the science part of it, you definitely would enjoy reading it – simple writing, engaging, pacy at times, mellowed down at times and you also get vivid images of the people he worked with/interacted with and their personalities. Watson gives a first person account of various events – significant, trivial, competitive, all of them leading to his discovery of the DNA structure.

The most impressive feature of this book is that Watson does a very good job in explaining what the field was going through back then. Everybody knew finding the structure of DNA was the million dollar question, you had to play your cards really safe at scientific meetings and parties – who you talk to, what you tell them and what you get back from them. It was a real race.

There was a point when they stopped their work on DNA and Watson talks about other things in general like food, weather and life in Cambridge in general until Linus Pauling publishes his paper. That’s when Watson and Crick get back to DNA, starting off things exactly where they left once they realize that Pauling made an error. This is the latter part which gets really exciting. It keeps you on your toes literally!

For a person who is not very familiar with all the other people Watson mentions: The only caution you’d have to take is to perceive the pictures of the characters he paints with a grain of salt. And this is where the downside of this piece is - though Rosalind Franklin’s results lay the foundation for their discovery, you somehow never get the feeling that she is truly acknowledged. I learnt this pretty late but was taken aback to know that they don’t mention Franklin even in their Nobel speech.

That aside, it is amazing how Watson and Crick tried to come up with really simple explanations (and proved them right) for some real complicated evidences reinforcing the truth behind Occam’s Razor.

Hello World!

Hi! Welcome to my little space on the dotcom world. I am a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania studying cell biology. Having a blog of my own has been on my to-do list since a long time now (like a couple of months maybe) and each time I think of this is when I hit upon or hear about another amazing story in science, history or literature and also when I think ‘now that makes a good anecdote’ based on my experiences and observations.

I thought for quite a bit about the blog title. Since I intend to make this less of a personal diary and more of a general and technical blog with most posts related to science, lab and research, ‘BasebyBase’ seemed a good one (alluding to the 4 bases in your DNA and how life builds on these). The goal for now is to keep it simple, try and reduce on the jargon as much as possible so any person can see what the big deal is all about as far as some of the great stories are concerned.

One such thing that comes to mind is what you're looking at - the first biological photograph(!) created by research groups at UT Austin and UCSF back in 2005. They grew E.coli in plates containing a sugar that turns black when digested by the bacteria. They engineered the bugs to digest the sugar only in the dark, i.e the gene that digests the sugar is turned off in the presence of light. A light image is projected onto the plate and depending on where these bugs were growing, you got either black or white and finally a living photograph. For more, read this work published in November, 2005 issue of Nature. Also for fun take a peek at more such fun images taken by these students here.

Though as much as we all like to write and share some interesting things with others, one of the compelling challenges of any blog is to keep posting on a regular basis. I hope to keep writing as often as I can and as much as I can. Thanks for stopping by and would appreciate any suggestions, comments and the like.