You can breathe now but the air is running out.
Lots of good and bad things happening recently.
I was asked by my lab professor to start helping with a big project he's doing right now. Basically, no one has ever worked out how/why the bones of the zebrafish (and to a large extent all higher order creatures) take on the distinct morphologies (unsymmetrical shapes, differing size and growth rates) they do. My professor and I noticed earlier in the term that under very high magnification there were very distinct growth rings, and rings within rings, on the opercle bone in the zebrafish. The project we're working on now is to work out a very detailed developmental time frame for bone growth, because it appears that these rings are directly correlated to distinct landmark time periods in embryonic development. This also has a lot of implications for extrapolative insights into the way higher order animals, such as ourselves, develop as well.
I thought I'd show this picture. This isn't a fish that I stained myself, but these are the kind of images that we get when I do staining in the lab.
The green you see isn't a stain, it's what is called fli, and it's been fused into the genome of the fish to be expressed in various tissue. The red that you see is what I do when I stain. The alizarin stain finds all ossified tissue in the fish and adheres a red pigment to it. You can see that in just one day there is a significant amount of bone growth, and we're trying to find out how the bone decides that it will take on that distinct triangular shape you see taking place in the top right picture. My professor has some interesting theories, but I'm interested to see if I can't squeeze my way in with another researcher in the lab who is looking at individual cell behavior during this time of almost exponential growth.
Anyways, I won't completely geek out right now, but the theories we've got bouncing around are really exciting and I'm really happy that I get to be apart of the discovery process. At the end of the research there's going to be a paper printed, and a very familiar name will be attached. AH! I can't wait until something pops up when I google my own name. haha Other than a page with all of the names of the kids who graduated in my high school class, that is.
So, my mom has been up in Eugene a lot over the past couple weeks. During her last standard check up, the cancer specialist felt something a little "iffy" around the area where her colon cancer was, so on Tuesday of next week she's going to have a biopsy performed to see what's going on. We're hopeful that it's nothing more than a little bit of strange scar tissue, but with her history, anything is possible. At the same time we were digesting this news her mammogram came back with "an area of interest" that will need to be explored, too. Her cancer was not in situ, which means it could have had the opportunity to send cancer cells to different parts of her body, but we're hoping her CT scan comes back clean on Tuesday.
I can't even begin to explain how terrified I am of going through all of that with her again. If you have any time, please say a little prayer for my mom and our family.
So yeah, I also found out today that my dad was in a car accident yesterday. He's not too badly injured, but he's having a lot of neck pain. He didn't go to the hospital after the accident, but he's going to go tonight as soon as his stupid girlfriend gets home. If I had a car he would have been there four hours ago, but what can you do. Say a little prayer for him while you're at it, too.
On a lighter note, I'm toying with the idea of having someone take a video of one of the researchers and I doing our "fish dance" where we sing clips of Shake Your Booty and Get Down Tonight in an attempt to put the fish in the mood to give lots of eggs. hahaha I do enjoy Jared a lot. I may have that done later next week when I set his fish up on Wednesday. Good times, good times.
I guess I'm done babbling now, I think I'm going to go watch Supernatural now. I hope you guys have a good weekend.
I was asked by my lab professor to start helping with a big project he's doing right now. Basically, no one has ever worked out how/why the bones of the zebrafish (and to a large extent all higher order creatures) take on the distinct morphologies (unsymmetrical shapes, differing size and growth rates) they do. My professor and I noticed earlier in the term that under very high magnification there were very distinct growth rings, and rings within rings, on the opercle bone in the zebrafish. The project we're working on now is to work out a very detailed developmental time frame for bone growth, because it appears that these rings are directly correlated to distinct landmark time periods in embryonic development. This also has a lot of implications for extrapolative insights into the way higher order animals, such as ourselves, develop as well.
I thought I'd show this picture. This isn't a fish that I stained myself, but these are the kind of images that we get when I do staining in the lab.
The green you see isn't a stain, it's what is called fli, and it's been fused into the genome of the fish to be expressed in various tissue. The red that you see is what I do when I stain. The alizarin stain finds all ossified tissue in the fish and adheres a red pigment to it. You can see that in just one day there is a significant amount of bone growth, and we're trying to find out how the bone decides that it will take on that distinct triangular shape you see taking place in the top right picture. My professor has some interesting theories, but I'm interested to see if I can't squeeze my way in with another researcher in the lab who is looking at individual cell behavior during this time of almost exponential growth.
Anyways, I won't completely geek out right now, but the theories we've got bouncing around are really exciting and I'm really happy that I get to be apart of the discovery process. At the end of the research there's going to be a paper printed, and a very familiar name will be attached. AH! I can't wait until something pops up when I google my own name. haha Other than a page with all of the names of the kids who graduated in my high school class, that is.
So, my mom has been up in Eugene a lot over the past couple weeks. During her last standard check up, the cancer specialist felt something a little "iffy" around the area where her colon cancer was, so on Tuesday of next week she's going to have a biopsy performed to see what's going on. We're hopeful that it's nothing more than a little bit of strange scar tissue, but with her history, anything is possible. At the same time we were digesting this news her mammogram came back with "an area of interest" that will need to be explored, too. Her cancer was not in situ, which means it could have had the opportunity to send cancer cells to different parts of her body, but we're hoping her CT scan comes back clean on Tuesday.
I can't even begin to explain how terrified I am of going through all of that with her again. If you have any time, please say a little prayer for my mom and our family.
So yeah, I also found out today that my dad was in a car accident yesterday. He's not too badly injured, but he's having a lot of neck pain. He didn't go to the hospital after the accident, but he's going to go tonight as soon as his stupid girlfriend gets home. If I had a car he would have been there four hours ago, but what can you do. Say a little prayer for him while you're at it, too.
On a lighter note, I'm toying with the idea of having someone take a video of one of the researchers and I doing our "fish dance" where we sing clips of Shake Your Booty and Get Down Tonight in an attempt to put the fish in the mood to give lots of eggs. hahaha I do enjoy Jared a lot. I may have that done later next week when I set his fish up on Wednesday. Good times, good times.
I guess I'm done babbling now, I think I'm going to go watch Supernatural now. I hope you guys have a good weekend.