All the same at Heart

Two weeks ago now, I was talking to someone about the sort of work I do (when I’m playing at being a scientist) and she mentioned that she knew someone else who studied rat hearts. She said she thought this was very odd, as surely there can’t be much in common between the heart of a rat and a human heart, so what could there be to learn? I was quite pleased with the response I was able to give so I wanted to put it up here too. 

Not so different really. Sarah Palin helps to demonstrate that we're not actually so different from any other animals. (Images from Therealbs2002 and feastoffun.com)

It’s quite a common misconception that the biology of a human is very different from the biology of any other animals. What can we ever hope to learn from them that would be any good to us? The classic example of this comes from Sarah Palin – that fount of well-informed scientific knowledge – who famously commented that ‘[Tax] dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good — things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.’ I was also reminded of this by the recent story about scientists making a ‘jellyfish’ out of rat heart cells. This sounds like a bit of fun but may actually come to revolutionise heart transplant procedures by allowing us to grow operational heart muscle from just a few cells. More on that later.

tMoL: Big Cell, Little Cell

I’m writing this as a homage to one of my closest friends on the blogosphere. The every wonderful LabRat has finally ended her fraught relationship with scientific research and is throwing herself wholeheartedly into science writing. Whilst I am hugely envious, I wish her all the best and hope she will remember me when she is rich and famous. Look out for her in future publications.

By way of background; Lab Rat has always had a fixation with the simpler things in life, by which I mean bacteria.

False colour E. coli, bacterial/prokaryotic cells.

All living organisms are made up of cells individual living units which are relatively self-supporting and capable of total self-replication, although this is complicated by the intricate interactions between different cells in larger organisms. Whilst larger creatures, like humans are made up of billions of cells, the vast majority of life on Earth exists as single celled microorganisms that cannot be observed with the naked eye.

Cells fall into two main groups, larger and more complex organisms, plants, animals and fungi are called eukaryotes (that’s us humans too) and have much more intricate cellular structures. The earliest forms of life, with the simplest cells are called prokaryotes, which include bacteria.

Resurrection: Halloween, spooky proteins and the return of ClearSci

It’s Halloween night and a dark shape is moving towards you through the ether of the information superhighway. Surrounded by the blackness you feel something closing in, disturbing the thick layers of accumulated dust. Just as you’re about to start screaming in terror… IT’S ME!!! Lights on, and by gosh it’s a mess in here, I don’t remember putting all of these spiders up for Halloween. Eww! Eww, eww, they’re real. I’m really going to need to spend some time cleaning all of this up…I’ll deal with that later.

Halloween revival.

So, if you’re here that means you’ve been on the look-out for more of my slightly eclectic and sporadic brand of science writing and I will try not to disappoint this time. Just so we’re all caught up, no I’m not dead and neither is this blog, it just went into reverse-hibernation over the summer (that’s called aestivation, if you’re interested). Also, neither of us has been temporarily reanimated for Halloween, this will hopefully be working its way back into my normal routine.

Summer was great! Although crazy, so I didn’t have much writing time (poor excuse I know). I joined the college graduate committee so I’ve spent a lot of time planning and organising events for our new freshers and negotiating college politics. I also finished the third rotation for my first year (currently in editing for the Wellcome Trust), selected my PhD project and wrote the full project proposal (I’m back with the second lab, playing with fission yeast genes). All of that earned me an MPhil which I will be collecting sometime in the new year.

A Right Royal Easter Spring Conference

Hi everyone! Sorry for the neglect, I'm working on several things at the moment so this place has been a bit neglected (hides the cracks in the paintwork). Have no fear that I do have several things chasing each other round my brain and one or the other of them may actually make it into print shortly.

Firstly, the launch of the Easter issue of BlueSci is expected on Thursday, so it's been crazy getting that printed and making sure that the online version will be ready to go too. Thankfully I think I'm on top of that now, but that was quite a few evenings eaten.

Also, and probably most excitingly, I went to my first real, proper, grown-up conference over most of last week so what with the long hours I was a bit short on news hunting/writing time. I did however squeeze in time to write several daily pieces for ConferenceCast, which will be appearing over the next few days. It was really cool, focusing on Cell & Developmental biology so we had loads of great speakers (and the occasional dull one, but not everyone's perfect). The prize winners were all awesome and really interesting, especially the Beddington medal winning PhD student who used music to illustrate how well cells moved together during migration.

Now I finally get some time in my third and final lab of the year, 2 weeks after we offcially started, so it's going to be pretty intensive to try and get some results in just 7 weeks. Also I'm putting together a poster about the importance of science communication for a one day conference later in the week.

 I also had to watch the new series of Doctor Who, of course, which is fantastic, although like everyone else I have NO clue what's going on.

So if you've been missing my senseless ramblings you can pop over to ConferenceCast and see exactly what I've been up to and I promise to get my next proper piece up ASAP and to stop writing all about myself.

SOS: Save our Science - Preventing Pandemic

Hey! I've been busy finishing my first project and after some last minute panicking it's all over and I'm moving on from chickens to yeast, but before I do I wanted to share this new story. A breakthrough in preventing the spread of Bird Flu, that has applications in protecting against a wide range of other viruses. This is the sort of story I've been looking forward to writing for a while, I hope you'll see why.


A group of researchers may have found a way to prevent the spread of bird flu through domestic populations, a revolution which could significantly reduce the risk of humans becoming infected. Not only that, but this technique could be easily used to protect against any viral infection in almost any species. It could even eventually be used to protect ourselves. This method requires no vaccinations and provides life-long protection from a broad range of different avian flu strains.

SOS: Save our Science - Cryptochrome, lord of time.

 I knew it'd happen sooner or later, I've started falling behind on postings. I'd hoped to put this up on New Year, but that didn't happen. Anyway, Happy New Year to all, hope you all enjoyed yourselves. I've been writing the report on my first project. The first draft is now done. Still a lot to do, and only 1.5 weeks until it's back to work. The next project is all about cytoskeleton and growth in yeast, so a bit different, I'll tell you more once I actually know anything...

So this is a relatively new paper I found, investigating how flies, and possible humans keep track of the time of day and how this is affected by our environment i.e. the sun. It seemed appropriate to do a time piece to see in the new year. Also I'm really excited as this will be my first official Research Blogging post!!

How do you know if it’s day or night? Simple, right? You look at your watch or you look outside. The differences are pretty obvious. But your body actually keeps track of these things itself. Certain proteins in your body keep track of the time of day. This system has been around for billions of years, and is shared between plants and animals.

The subconscious ability to tell night and day depends on circadian rhythms; regular changes in the presence and activity of timekeeper proteins within a part of your brain called the pineal gland (so named because it looks like a pine cone). Experiments have shown that in a room with no clocks and no changes in light levels a human will fall into a roughly 24 hour cycle of sleeping and waking (average 24 hours 11 mins). The average cycle differs between species and in some arctic species appears to be intermittent. Although the cycle is entirely self-sustaining it is trained and altered by light input, modifying it to be more exactly 24 hours long. This involves light sensitive proteins in your eye which signal to the pineal gland.

tMoL: Nucleus

The brain of the cell. It is one of the most well known elements of an animal cell, and is common to all higher organisms (eukaryotes – animals, plants,fungi), as with most structures inside a cell it does not occur in bacteria (prokaryotes). Most DNA in a cell is found in the nucleus, it is the storage centre for all of the information to make more cells. The nucleus is also full of proteins which control which genes are active in a cell and help to pack all of the DNA into such a tiny space. This is how cells are able to become specialised to a specific function, by controlling which genes are active.

Lab 1: Only the Nose Glows (The reality)

I’m back home for Christmas and all done with my first rotation. I’m going to start writing it all up tomorrow, 7000 words in 4 weeks. So it seemed like a good time to write a post about what I’ve actually been doing over the last 9 weeks.

I’ve been trying to find out what makes olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) from neural crest stem cells (NCCs). This means I’ve been looking at which genes are active in these cells at different points in development. The information from an active gene is converted into a messenger molecule (mRNA) and this information is then used to construct a protein, which has a specific role within a cell. mRNA and proteins can be coloured using specific markers.

tMoL: The Meanings of Life - Boxes, little boxes

I’m creating this section as a means for me to blog without having to put in too much effort. In each post I’m going to pick one of the many words and acronyms developed by academics to confuse everyone else, and explain it for everyone to understand, and provide you with a few useful little facts. The first few are going to be pretty easy, words that come up in the media all the time. Words that everyone has heard and probably knows the meaning of but not necessarily some of the more interesting bits.

Cell – I want to start with cells because they are an important part of my work, they are generally most active and undergo the most changes during development. They are also the basis for life and are generally the start point of most discussions of the evolution of life (although actually there was a lot of good stuff before that, which tends to get overlooked). Also I will be talking about them to local school children in a few months and hopefully this will help me to organise some of my ideas.