Aaron Irving – Nightshadow

I am kind of fond of long random titles for blog posts.

Just got back from seeing Avatar in 3D with a good mate who is visiting from Tasmania (Seth). James cameron did a good job in re-creating a fantasy world, as did Weta Digital. I quite liked the storyline and character development – despite the bad reviews. Was a visually stunning movie, though I felt a little dizzy/headachy by the end. This was likely due to the heat though and my dehydration. 36 degrees is not that hot (when not humid) – but the warm wind makes it pretty uncomfortable.

More warm weather to come – yay. Christmas in Brissy though so the weather will be nice then. A whirlwind 4 day trip, but c’est la vie.

Work has been busy. Yay. As per the monash guidelines we have from the 23rd to 4th jan off. I was in today though to do a maxi – got a cool new construct in that I want to use asap. Writing up my paper (actually several’) – hopefully a decent impact factor first author though. Got news today the Molecular Therapy paper with Michael got accepted (I’m an author anyway, even if not first). Papers are always good. Finally on top of things and starting to feel comfortable. Eventually I will get motivation back and maybe even be inspired to go out photographing. meh, maybe.

Enjoy the break peeps – happy festivus (As daz would say), merry christmas (remember it’s about jesus and not gifts/food) and happy new Year!

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.

So – science is geeky. We all know it and embrace it. Sometimes you can use geeky scientific knowledge to make cool objects.

The bloodlamp by Dutch designer Mike Thompson is a glass ball filled with Luminol. It reacts upon binding blood to fluoresce – hence giving off light.

Pic c/o the NS pic of the day – http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn15018-pick-of-the-pictures

It was designed to make the person think about how precious energy is and how much they really need light.

anyway – how’s that for a random post of the day.

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

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.

It’s the drug by Roche called oseltamivir, or tamiflu. They give it out during pandemics and to treat the seriously sick. They also dish it out occasionally as a prophylactic to prevent spread.

That’s what I just picked up from the pharmacist. Steph is getting tested for swine flu atm (since she is sick with the flu and been exposed to an Influenza A positive patient). She finds out wed arvo.

yay!

Just playing around with the Safe-T-Light and the fluorescent DNA stains.

Simon:

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, a week of really crap lab results, or no results, triggered by continuous stuff-ups by myself. Intermixed with random bits of crap, my car overheating going down the M1 and me luckily pulling off (and noticing it) just before roadworks would have prevented stopping for about 5 kms. To top that off I was sick for a bit, but got over it pretty fast. The weekend was good, victory vs juventis friday night. Melb played better than expected though the end killed them with some awesome Juve’ goals. Sat night was colonial tramcar restaurant with steph, Em and Seth. A little over-rated, but good nonetheless. Following this was casino, random walk across the city to get coffee and then chai back @ my place. sunday was a bit of shopping, and bunnings and using the BBQ to cook dinner (after buying gas from bunnings). So a decent end I guess… except for sunday’s work (in between shops etc) and monday’s work giving NO DAMN PROTEIN from my purification. argh!. I am use to things at least partially working lately.