Aaron Irving – Nightshadow

So recently I went to a conference on lights. Pretty lights. Fluorescence if you will. Lights in Life Sciences 2009. Damn impressive. What people are visualising with ocnfocal microscopes, widefield microscopes, 3d structured illumination, PALM, dSTORM, STED microscopy etc. Being able to visualise single proteins within a cell via a tagged fluorophore. It’s impressive. Kudos to the people coming up with the new technology – and to those developing the new fluorophores (a  lot of these techniques require photo-switchable fluorophores such as dendra, eos, PS-CFP2, kindling etc). I can easily see why the big journals are asking for this sort of technology rather than basic microscopy and “colocalisation”. I am glad to have a project that has allowed me to develop skills in advanced confocal microscopy.

I think I want to learn every available technique and then consult out.

I also covered my poster at the conference and a second poster for the ever evolving http://Researchgate.net

hmm. back to work I guess.

p.s. clannzu sounds damn good with rain in the background.

Why must one walk up a rampfrom the footpath to get to “lower ground” in my complex?

Why was there one supra, one mitsu Evo X, one GTI, one skyline GTR, 2 HSV coupes a WRX STi, a civc type R (rally prepped) and 2 highly modified nissan patrols in my apartment carpark at midday? Why spend lots of money on a car then leave it parked in the garage all week long.

Why does the name “Craven Cottage” sound so cool?

Why did the butcher let me down? (Worst lamb shanks ever for diner tonight, I swear the sheep must have been 20 yr old reject stock).

Merlo or Di Bella?

Why does the microscope work fine when your cells don’t express the protein properly, but screws up when you get good clean expression?

Enough questions for now anyway…..

On another note, I’m going to cross post my ResearchGate Blog posts from their to hear aswell. Starting with this one on Gene therapy to restore color blindness.

A recent Nature letters paper by Mancuso et al details the use of a recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) in gene delivery to restore the function of photo-pigments in squirrel monkeys. The male monkeys, red-green color-blind from birth, obtained the ability to process red-green color information via the delivery of the L-opsin gene into the retina. 

While this research opens the door for further hope of gene therapy involved in human eye conditions, including blindness, it also raises some interesting questions. It was previously thought that the brain of adult monkeys would be too "hard-wired" to gain a beneficial effect from the restoration of deficient pathways. The recent paper proves that gene therapy can be utilized in "middle aged" monkeys, and is not solely an avenue to be pursued during early development. This adds a lot of significance to work already begun in human patients, to restore an enzyme involved in a type of hereditary blindness.

Original Article:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08401.html

Gene therapy for red–green colour blindness in adult primates

Katherine Mancuso¹, William W. Hauswirth², Qiuhong Li², Thomas B. Connor³, James A. Kuchenbecker¹, Matthew C. Mauck³, Jay Neitz¹ & Maureen Neitz¹

This is a pretty awesome loophole potentially allowing free access to journals people would not normally have available.

ResearchGATE launches SelfArchiving
Repository
Scientific Online Network ResearchGATE blazes a new route into the world of Open
Access
Boston, September 15th 2009. The last few weeks have been big here at ResearchGATE
(www.researchgate.net), the world’s largest online scientific platform. We have only been online
since May last year, but already have 140,000 members. Recently, we introduced our
international Job Board for Science and Higher Education. But today is set to be even bigger, as
we are launching our SelfArchiving
Repository. This will make full‐text articles available to the
public, for free – the first application of its kind worldwide!
Currently, there is no way for researchers to access millions of publications in their full version
online. ResearchGATE is now changing this by enabling users to upload their published research
directly to their profile pages (a system called the “green route” to Open Access). Our
publication index, containing metadata for 35 million publications, will be automatically
matched with the SHERPA RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo) data set of journal and
publisher’s selfarchiving
agreements. As a result, authors will know which versions of their
articles they can legally upload. Since nine out of ten journals allow selfarchiving,
this project
could give thousands of researchers immediate access to articles that are not yet freely available.
Our SelfArchiving
Repository does not infringe on copyrights because each profile page within
ResearchGATE is legally considered the personal website of the user (and the majority of journal
publishers allow articles to be openly accessible on personal homepages). Therefore, each user
can upload his or her published articles in compliance with selfarchiving
regulations . Our
publication index makes every publication identifiable and is searchable. Since each profile is
networked to the larger platform, the uploaded resources will form an enormous pool of
research for our members. Of course, it’s free of charge, like the all the other resources at
ResearchGATE.
To learn more about ResearchGATE and its many features, visit www.researchgate.net and sign
up for a free profile. Also, feel free to contact our team at press@researchgate.net.
To learn more about SelfArchiving,
visit www.self‐archiving.me

so let’s see. I’ve worked my ass off doing crazy microscopy on fancy confocal microscopes (FRAP, FRET etc).

I flew to the gold coast for my sister-in-laws wedding (of which I was the photographer).

Had a very brief sojourn in Brissy with a catchup of some of the old DICIMM crew.

Played with lots of relatives/friends new kids (zach, anya, etc).

possibly caught a cold.

signed a contract that may fall through due to East Melbourne being too close to the city (and so high risk).

ARGH!.

Ok – this whole media perspective on tamiflu is really beginning to shit me. The drug, oseltamivir, manufactured by Roche, is shit. The way they have modified it to be available in capsule format is the major reason why the efficacy of it is so CRAP. It seriously decreases the effectiveness of the drug and allows a door for resistance to the drug by the virus. But hey – the aussie government decided to stockpile it. Yay, aren’t they brilliant. It is well proven that tamiflu is not as effective as the australian counterpart – Relenza (licensed by CSL). But hey, what does that matter. There are tamiflu resistant strains of H1N1 “swine” flu already out there, as well as Tamiflu resistant strains of real flu (H5N1 avian influenza, H1N1 non-swine influenza etc).

The boys down at AAHL are working on a vaccine – hopefully it will be as effective as their trial effort with a single injection multi-valent vaccine against H5N1 that was recently published. CSL is also doing a similar thing.

Media – please focus on a real threat – like the outbreak of avian influenza affecting Thailand/vietnam and countries like Egypt etc.

so – in case you haven’t guessed. This blog has no switched – and the servers’ domain structure etc will be redirected very shortly. Currently migrating everything to the new servers and enjoying the chilly melbourne weather. yay!. Also sick with possibly the flu (hopefully swine flu) and a headache.

So, today was a max of 43 degrees. Now that is damn hot, like really hot. Still no real humidity which makes it almost bearable, but not quite. All week it’s going to be that damn hot. I walked to the car in the middle of the day and back, as a result I have a mild sunburn. The proton was running quite hot aswell.

Well anyway, no choice but to deal, drink lots of water and yeh – why not some Dr Pepper.

USA Foods www.usafoods.com.au sells Dr Pepper, so I bought 24 cans. I also bought some Lipton raspberry flavoured instant Iced Tea, PopTarts (for Matt) and a can of Cherry (Code Red) Mountain Dew (crap).

Hooray for aircon – lets hope the energy companies have enough power to let us keep running it.

Oh yeah, did I mention some of connex’s (victorian rail) tracks buckled under the heat today.

So, for those of you who don’t know: I participate in researchgate. It’s a form of social networking/collaborating/data sharing etc site for scientists. Any form of researchers really (including arts/history etc). Recently it hit 20,000 members. In like what, 7 months. Anyway, it’s rad – check out the entry about it’s 20k membership – http://blog.researchgate.net/index.php?/archives/49-ResearchGATE-celebrates-20,000-members.html

So this morning I wander on down to the proton, which I have finally paid off the student loan for, and it was covered in ice. colder weather is starting to kick in. None of this crappy brissy ice on the windscreen, it was virtually covered in ice. c’est la vie.

damn students loans are evil, as soon as you are “expected” to graduate they hit you with bigger interest.. nothing compared to a normal personal loan, but still. I want to buy before the end of the year, need to save $$$$.

blah, almost time for the coffee van to arrive.

So, who is happy with the new government? Are people amazed by the new budget? Has it made Australia better off. Are they happy with the labor government’s point-of-view that a complete stagnation of the economy is the only solution?

Regardless of what I think, the figures don’t add up. 16000 people will apparently miss out on the baby bonus now, and about 40,000 will miss out on some form of family benefit tax. Interesting since the last sensis showed 216,000 Australian households earning over $150,000.

Funding for medical research/science has been redistributed, reconfigured and essentially reduced. The previous government has steadily increased funding over the last 10 years to come almost level with other developed countries (obviously paling in comparison to the states). This government kept the total amount of funding the same. When you factor in quite a large inflation, funding for Medical research/Science has decreased. No wonder people head overseas and take their gifted minds/inventions with them.

I liked Rudd when he was just the local MP in brissy. The government is screwing the country up, and the liberals are like pathetic little kids bickering over the scraps thrown to them after their defeat.