Only time will tell, If we stand the test of time
All is well in the lab lifestyle, as I search for answers to the great mysteries of humanities in the tiny, thoughtless embryos of my favorite insectoid friends. My tiny subjects, despite being fated for a short career in modeling before their ultimate, timely end, continually strike me with their embryonic beauty. I find myself rooting for each miniscule drosophila as I place them onto slides, cheering for their successful expression of GFP and RFP such that I can immortalize their dorsal openings forever. Some might identify these feelings as Lima syndrome, the inverse of Stockholm syndrome, and some might just be correct. But I still like to imagine that, as I shoot lasers through the oblong, white creatures, they are looking back at me and smiling, grateful to be contributing to the advancement of science!
So here we are, back for our second installment of news from Blogwarts. After two weeks on a bicycle, I am finally figuring out how to work the pedals, and this one time I successfully turned left. I was so excited, not in the Zoolander sense of a turning inability, but instead in the sense that I had only been able to turn a few degrees off of straight before this momentous event. The art of going up curbs still eludes me, and this inability has already made for multiple embarrassing encounters. So if you ever see me riding my bicycle near a curb, and somehow I end up falling and throwing myself at you, please do not get the wrong idea. It was just an accident, I promise. Although, come to think of it, I could probably use my cycling handicap to my advantage! I just can’t wait until I actually learn how to ride a bike!
Which leads smoothly into my expectations for this summer and the research I am attempting to do during my 8 week behind a microscope. I would love to learn to ride a bicycle like Lance Armstrong. I also want to increase the size of my heart to become superhuman like him. Although this has yet to be related to my research, I feel that I am coming closer and closer to bridging the gap between dorsal closure in drosophila melanogaster and forced, rapid microevolution in vascular tissue. Or maybe not. I also am hoping to learn how to glide, in the dancing sense of the word, so that I can move everywhere without actually LOOKING like I am moving. Gliding is harder than it looks though, as any large bird or those sail plane things can tell you.
But beyond gliding and biking, I also came into this summer with both ambitious and critical expectations for my lab experience. Just as I tell everyone who asked me a year ago, and those who continue to ask me now, I am wholly uncertain as to what I want to do in my future. So, why not try research? My hope is that, with the multitude of experiences I will accumulate over the course of the HHRF program, I can decide if I want to pursue research in life beyond the dream world of undergraduate college. I want to discover if I can love being immersed in solving scientific enigmas for 8 hours or more a day. So far, it hasn’t been too bad. In a broader sense, I also want to see if my true academic love is biology, if it is truly the subject I will be most happy pursuing in school and in a career. Most importantly, and most generally, I just want to learn. I want to fill every nook and cranny within my gray matter with knowledge. And I think after two weeks, it is about maxed out, partially due to my distinct lack of brain, but also the sheer amount of facts and information I have absorbed just working with the other scientists in the Kiehart lab.
So far, I have yet to fulfill any of these expectations completely enough to draw conclusions, but we are getting there. And last week, my research got much, much more interesting. After two days of work on a microscope worth more than my life, I was able to create beautiful pictures like this.
What you are seeing that picture is the dorsal opening in an ~24 hour old drosophila embryo. The RFP is Moesin and it highlights the actin/myosin filopodia throughout the embryo. The GFP is cadherin, which is a protein located in the intercellular adhesive regions in the amnioserosa. Thus, generally speaking, the red you see is the lateral epidermis of the embryo, and the green is the amnioserosa. As described in last week’s blog, this opening will eventually close as the green tissue is forced beneath the pinching “purse string” of the lateral epidermis. Voila, dorsal closure in color!
Besides the microscopy, I have also been learning significantly more about Ginger’s research, but I am going to find out more before pretending to know what I am talking about! Let me just leave my faithful readers (who actually don’t exist) with the cliff hanger that it is going to involve gated channels, mechanosensation, and RNAi mediated knockout of RPK and PPK proteins!
Live long and prosper!
