(no subject)

[catsittingstill]

You may remember that we're going to the synchrotron in the middle of March. The x-rays at the synchrotron are so powerful that instead of taking days to analyze a crystal, as we do with the in-house (actually it's in the basement--these machines often end up in the basement because they're very heavy and because they need to be where there's very little vibration) we can take a full data set in an hour or so. This is great--but we have about 20 hours to fill, so we need lots of crystals.

You may remember that we finally figured out how to get good diffraction from the crystals I'm working on, by adding extra salt (or maybe some glycine--it turns out we added both and now we don't know which made the difference, but with luck we can sort that out by synchrotron time). The boss was very psyched.

Now he wants crystals of a seleno-methionine derivative of this protein by synchrotron time. I don't have time to explain this right now--but it involves moving the gene for the protein into a different bacterium, getting the bacterium to make lots of the protein, breaking up the bacteria and purifying the protein, then coaxing the protein to crystallize. I've laid out the potential schedule and it could work. Barely. Provided nothing goes wrong.

Those of you who have worked in science (hi tnatj!) will have some idea of the shivers that run down my spine as I consider the last sentence.



I'm still working on improvising to chord maps with the mandolin. "Rosin the bow" is a nice simple song, if not the sort of jazz song normally used for this kind of thing. I'm having fun and starting to incorporate some fast runs and stuff, but they're just runs--not all that melodic. I'm pretty sure my teacher is doing something fancier.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'll ask what the concentration of their solution is and they'll say that they're not sure, they just dissolved a tiny crystal for me. This is my cue to begin the eye-roll. "High," is pretty much what it comes down to. The NMR gang here also has a different idea of "lots" than I do.

The sequencer is the less sensitive approach. You need maybe 10 pmol. A good strong coomassie-stained band or two. By tryptic digest and mass spectrometry we can identify a silver-stained band. One picomole is lots.

Michael