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.

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.