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.

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.