Notes from the Mad Scientists' Home
Nov. 16th, 2006 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lwoodI work at a Mad Scientists' Home.
The following e-mail just flitted around the entire Institute:
Hi everyone,
I would like to know if somebody can provide me with the pRL/CMV plasmid to normalize luciferase activity.
Thank you for your attention,
Sincerely
P— D—
Y'know what this medical technobabble means?
It means he's Doing Stuff with and to glow-in-the-dark mice.
Over and above the actively luminescent mice, we have many more flourescent ones as well, that glow under blacklights (flouresce) in an array of natural, yet nurglish, colors from red to blue.
But why make with the mad crazy transgenic science and make glow-in-the-conditionally-dark mice, thus bringing ever closer the zombie revolution?
It's about DNA, which most of you know in a vaguely fuzzy way as that whole genetic blueprint thing.
At the level we're talking about, consider it more like a player-piano roll, or a cookbook, only instead of music or meals, the job is to keep a catalog of proteins to churn out*. A recipe to churn out a protein will start with the moral equivalent of "MESSAGE BEGINS" for the self-replicating protein set, then the recipe for the actual protein, then the equivalent of "MESSAGE ENDS".
The recipe may be to make a very useful chemical, or one that's mostly useful but a smidge pear-shaped--and the ones that are a little wrong will, over time, cause failure in progressively higher systems. Here at the Mad Scientists' Home, we are very interested in the slightly wrong ones, as the slightly bad things they do appear to be significantly contributing factors towards the development of heart disease and the several neurodegenerative disorders, most famous of which is Munin's Bane†.
Now, the difference between the "perfectly fine" and "sorta wrong" proteins is down at the molecular level. And I admit, we have X-Ray crystallographers and all kinds of fine scientific equipment, but there had to be an easier way to figure this shit out.
And there is.
If you look back a couple entries, you can see that I posted some recipes recently. One was for carrot cake and frosting. The creation of the carrot cake and its frosting are independent of each other, but linked because they fell within the purview of the general recipe. What our mad scientists do is, somewhere in the recipe for the protein, they insert a bit that describes luminescence, flourescence, all that kind of thing. To touch back on the carrot cake, it means you've still got your cake, only now you'll be grinding out, not just cellular peptide cake, but cellular peptide cake with flourescent mint frosting‡.
Therefore, whenever the kinda-wrong protein is generated, you can tell, much later, by seeing which parts glow. Now that it comes in colors besides green, you can track multiple proteins at once. By "much later", however, I generally mean "after death, dissection, slicing into ridiculously thin pieces, and applying one of our fine microscopes", which is a lot of work but much easier to tell when, and where, the protein you care about was generated than when they didn't come in fun colors.
And that's why we have glow-inna-dark mice. I may never actually get to see the glow-in-the-dark mice, but knowing they're there is still kinda neat.
I love my workplace!
-- Lorrie
* -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dr_beowulf knows I'm a) overgeneralizing (at the very least leaving RNA beat up at the side of the road) and b) wrong on several details. Dammit, Jim, I'm an engineer, not a doctor! Also, in keeping with Sturgeon's Law, it also turns out that a fantastic amount of the information in DNA, as far as we can figure out, is noise. Content-free static. This is why you share 98+% of the same genetic data as a chimpanzee, but also 70% of the same data as a pumpkin. Therefore, the fascination that cadhla and auntiematter share for All Things Pumpkin is merely an expression of their deep, meaningful kinship with the noble orange squash. I love the smell of metagenetics in the morning. Smells like...bad science.
† - Okay, officially it's Alzheimer's Disease. But admit it, Muninsbane sounds way, way cooler.
‡ - Gratuitous references for this paragraph brought to you by Big Trouble in Little China:
The following e-mail just flitted around the entire Institute:
Hi everyone,
I would like to know if somebody can provide me with the pRL/CMV plasmid to normalize luciferase activity.
Thank you for your attention,
Sincerely
P— D—
Y'know what this medical technobabble means?
It means he's Doing Stuff with and to glow-in-the-dark mice.
Over and above the actively luminescent mice, we have many more flourescent ones as well, that glow under blacklights (flouresce) in an array of natural, yet nurglish, colors from red to blue.
But why make with the mad crazy transgenic science and make glow-in-the-conditionally-dark mice, thus bringing ever closer the zombie revolution?
It's about DNA, which most of you know in a vaguely fuzzy way as that whole genetic blueprint thing.
At the level we're talking about, consider it more like a player-piano roll, or a cookbook, only instead of music or meals, the job is to keep a catalog of proteins to churn out*. A recipe to churn out a protein will start with the moral equivalent of "MESSAGE BEGINS" for the self-replicating protein set, then the recipe for the actual protein, then the equivalent of "MESSAGE ENDS".
The recipe may be to make a very useful chemical, or one that's mostly useful but a smidge pear-shaped--and the ones that are a little wrong will, over time, cause failure in progressively higher systems. Here at the Mad Scientists' Home, we are very interested in the slightly wrong ones, as the slightly bad things they do appear to be significantly contributing factors towards the development of heart disease and the several neurodegenerative disorders, most famous of which is Munin's Bane†.
Now, the difference between the "perfectly fine" and "sorta wrong" proteins is down at the molecular level. And I admit, we have X-Ray crystallographers and all kinds of fine scientific equipment, but there had to be an easier way to figure this shit out.
And there is.
If you look back a couple entries, you can see that I posted some recipes recently. One was for carrot cake and frosting. The creation of the carrot cake and its frosting are independent of each other, but linked because they fell within the purview of the general recipe. What our mad scientists do is, somewhere in the recipe for the protein, they insert a bit that describes luminescence, flourescence, all that kind of thing. To touch back on the carrot cake, it means you've still got your cake, only now you'll be grinding out, not just cellular peptide cake, but cellular peptide cake with flourescent mint frosting‡.
Therefore, whenever the kinda-wrong protein is generated, you can tell, much later, by seeing which parts glow. Now that it comes in colors besides green, you can track multiple proteins at once. By "much later", however, I generally mean "after death, dissection, slicing into ridiculously thin pieces, and applying one of our fine microscopes", which is a lot of work but much easier to tell when, and where, the protein you care about was generated than when they didn't come in fun colors.
And that's why we have glow-inna-dark mice. I may never actually get to see the glow-in-the-dark mice, but knowing they're there is still kinda neat.
I love my workplace!
-- Lorrie
* -
dr_beowulf knows I'm a) overgeneralizing (at the very least leaving RNA beat up at the side of the road) and b) wrong on several details. Dammit, Jim, I'm an engineer, not a doctor! Also, in keeping with Sturgeon's Law, it also turns out that a fantastic amount of the information in DNA, as far as we can figure out, is noise. Content-free static. This is why you share 98+% of the same genetic data as a chimpanzee, but also 70% of the same data as a pumpkin. Therefore, the fascination that cadhla and auntiematter share for All Things Pumpkin is merely an expression of their deep, meaningful kinship with the noble orange squash. I love the smell of metagenetics in the morning. Smells like...bad science.† - Okay, officially it's Alzheimer's Disease. But admit it, Muninsbane sounds way, way cooler.
‡ - Gratuitous references for this paragraph brought to you by Big Trouble in Little China:
Jack Burton: Terrific, a six-demon bag. Sensational. What's in it, Egg?and Star Trek: The Next Generation "A cellular peptide cake...with mint frosting." This footnote is here to tell you that I'm doing some more handwaving, like "how we get the glowy bit into the DNA".
Egg Shen: Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-11-16 08:09 pm (UTC)AHA! THAT'S THE REFERENCE!
Um, sorry. :-) It was bouncing around in the back of my head until I came to this. Very fun analogy. I'm still getting images of glow-in the dark zombie mice squeaking BRAINS at a rave.
(See what happens when I don't get enough sleep? ;-)
Sounds like a fascinating place to work.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-16 08:19 pm (UTC)-- Lorrie
no subject
Date: 2006-11-16 08:43 pm (UTC)Especially if they accidentally got released into the wild, and bred with ordinary mice. Cats would love it!!
no subject
Date: 2006-11-16 08:56 pm (UTC)The mice, given their extremely exotic pedigrees, are expensive.
Once, during a fire drill, I opined to the department intern that we had a whole special disaster plan specifically for the mice (in their Undisclosed Location).
The intern scoffed.
We order transgenic mice* from around the world all the time, as well as whipping up some of our own. It costs something like $250,000 to establish a new line to one's particular spec, and single individuals can cost anywhere from $250 to $50,000.
The mice, therefore, taken collectively, were worth more than the intern and I combined.
And the Intern Was Enlightened.
-- Lorrie
* - Obligatory, yet gratuitous, reference:
no subject
Date: 2006-11-16 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-16 11:02 pm (UTC)I think I've missed maybe one of these since I got here. I can go on for several pages about the life cycle of HIV, with loving detail and focus on why it's hard to kill that fucker dead.
-- Lorrie
no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 06:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 12:13 am (UTC)-smk
no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 12:21 am (UTC)Well, it must be said that making the skin of the mouse glow isn't generally what they're after, more like "when this particular protein expresses itself", which you'd only notice in particular circumstances. And, overall, I gather that flourescence, which can work with a brain slice and blacklight, may be more currently useful than active luminescence, which does require some energetic input.
But yeah, dammit, I want a glow inna dark mousie!
-- Lorrie
no subject
Date: 2006-11-17 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-18 12:01 am (UTC)-- Lorrie