mglater's blog

I can see a person crying while wearing clothing with a sports team logo. From that I could infer that the team they support recently lost a game.

The plant was located by entering the Durfee Conservatory via the West entrance. The plant was the closest in the left row along the aisle. To photograph the whole plant, the photographer stood by the entrance door and aimed his phone camera at the plant. He then walked backwards towards the right of the building until the whole plant could fit in the frame of the picture. The close-up picture of the flower was taken of the closest flower to the door along the aisle side of the plant. The phone was moved close to the flower in order to frame the flower in the image and the photo was taken. To provide a scale, another picture was taken with a “Dunkin Donuts” gift card held above the flower. The name of the plant was taken from a card on the pillar from which the plant was growing.

Creating the Figure

    Four individual images were composited together in Inkscape to form the final figure. Each image was given a small letter in the upper left corner of the image, from A-D. The coordinates and dimensions of each image are located in the table below.

The map was created via use of a website at “mapchart.net/world.html”. On this site, the countries China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea were highlighted in red. The image was then saved and downloaded in a .png format, which could then be used in the figure.    

The plant was located by entering the Durfee Conservatory via the West entrance. The plant was the closest in the left row along the aisle. To photograph the whole plant, the photographer aimed his phone camera at the plant and stood by the entrance door. He then moved backwards towards the right of the building until the whole plant could fit in the picture. The specific flower picture was taken of the closest flower to the door along the aisle side of the plant. The phone was moved close to the flower in order to frame the flower in the image and the photo was taken. To provide a scale, another picture was taken with a “Dunkin Donuts” gift card held above the flower. The flower was shown to be roughly the same length as the card.

Figure 1. The tongue of a giraffe. The giraffe is one of three animals known to have a blue tongue.  Creative commons licensed image by Robyn Jay https://flic.kr/p/gthW8a

Once developed, this assay can be used by any lab to understand the results of their experimentation. The design for the assay also uses the Tet-On system. Doxycycline is a drug which cannot normally penetrate the BBB. This means that under normal circumstances, the Tet gene will not activate. Adding a drug which breaks down the BBB allows doxycycline to penetrate, and gene transcription to occur. Using a fluorescent protein as the Tet product, a baseline level of fluorescence when only doxycycline is added could be determined. Using that level as a control, the effectiveness of a drug could be determined. If the drug breaks down the BBB, doxycycline will more readily enter the brain, and more fluorescent product would be produced. 

My summer research project has two major components. Both components use a tetracycline-controlled transcriptional activation system, a system designed to control transgene expression. The system can be designed so that the addition of tetracycline turns on expression or turns off expression, giving the systems the names Tet-On and Tet-Off, respectively. In this experiment, I will be using the Tet-On system. In a Tet system, the tetracycline transactivator (tTA) must be bound to an operator sequence on the DNA in order for transcription to occur. In the case of Tet-On, the tTA is only able to bind to the operator when also bound to tetracycline or a tetracycline derivative such as doxycycline. The addition of the doxycycline allows transcription to begin, giving very tight temporal control. 

Shh is a cell-cell signaling molecule that has been conserved between all vertebrates. Shh has been shown to be a vital part of driving cell differentiation in other areas of the body. This experiment will allow for a better understanding of the effect of sonic hedgehog in the developing, which will provide insight into the control of cellular development, the cell cycle, and of diseases such as cancer. This will be accomplished using the Tet-On system, a system designed to control transgenes. The genes are unable to be transcribed until the binding of tetracycline or a tetracycline derivative (such as doxycycline) to an activator protein. The addition of the doxycycline allows transcription to begin, giving very tight temporal control. The design of the experiment is to observe the effects of activating the transgene at different time points, ranging from 4 hours post fertilization (hpf) to 48 hpf.

    The purpose of this project is to provide a chance to practice preparing part of a scientific paper. In scientific writing, there are divisions that nearly every paper includes. One of these divisions is a methods section. This section allows the reader to understand the steps followed by the researcher, and if desired, to recreate the experiment. Allowing the reader to see how the research was done not only helps the reader understand the experiment, but also makes the data more trustworthy. Being able to write a coherent methods section is an important skill to have for an aspiring biologist.