Category 4 Microbiology

Promo material for our 3rd event coming up this Wednesday. Will be bringing my camera so will have some photos later this week...

Herbal Remedies for Diabetes: Fact or Fiction?

Just uploading the promo material from our second event earlier this month. Many thanks to Dr Kenneth White for speaking for us and for offering such a balanced and interesting perspective. Hopefully there will be more properly funded research in this area in future!

My First Gel Electrophoresis Run

My first gel electrophoresis run! Actually, strictly this is not true as I did one last year for our assessed practical*, but the gel was already pre-prepared and from what I remember we only really pipetted our samples into the wells while the rest was more or less done for us.

In this example we're determining the identity of two unknown dyes by comparing the bands produced by gel electrophoresis to the 8 other known dyes also in the run. The gel was prepared as a 0.8% concentration of agarose with TAE buffer and run at 90 volts for half an hour. I've included a summary of the results below.

Fig1. Substances in wells 1-10 are seen migrating either towards the anode (red), the cathode (black), or staying still (neutral). Lines A, B, C, and D act as a ruler for the 4 bands formed by dyes 9 and 10. A starting point “line X” has been included for comparison.

Fig2. Table of dyes, their respective well numbers, and the charge as derived from the movement towards anode or cathode as depicted in Fig1.

Based on the intersections of lines A (with 1 and 9) and D (2 and 9), the unknown dye in lane 9 is a mixture of bromocresol green and methylene blue.

Based on the intersections of lines B (6 and 10) and C (4 and 10), the unknown dye in lane 10 is methyl orange, and safranine orange.

The most remarkable observation is that Line D shares its distance not only with dyes 2 and 9, but also 3. Although it becomes clearer when comparing colour that the band formed by (unknown) mixture 9 is homologous with dye 2 (Bromocresol Green), the fact that the purple dye #3 (Bromophenol Blue) has also run to the same distance implies that Bromophenol Blue has a similar size, density and charge to that of Bromocresol Green. This appears to be the case as they have very similar molecular structures, differing only in the addition of 2 methyl groups, as laid out in Fig3 below.

The shearing on bands 1, 6, 7, 8 and 10 may be due to either overly concentrated dilution of dyes, too great a volume of dyes being pipetted resulting in overfilled wells, or running the gel too quickly. Difference in concentration could be tested for by using spare empty wells to load 50% dilutions of the dyes with the biggest trails (eg. 6 and 7) and compare their trails with their concentrated counterparts as part of the run. Similarly, the gel could be run on a diminished voltage to see what affect this would have on the quality of the run.

Streptococcus and Staphylococcus Study-aids

Thought i'd upload these 2 images I made on photoshop to help me remember the virulence factors of Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes.

I had the idea to make a series of leukemon cards (a portmanteau of "pokemon" and "leukocyte"); the idea being to make flash cards of the various white blood cells in the form of a trading card game, with their respective "attacks" and "defences" listed along with a picture of their morphology, their haematopoietic lineage, location in body etc. Problem it's so labour intensive to do on your own as to warrant the process impractical in the face of mounting deadlines. Maybe i can revisit this idea when I have some more time. I think it would really help students consolidate their by providing an easy revision resource, and maybe offer younger students an appealing route into immunology.

LMU Life Sciences Society - First Event

Some photos from our first Life Sciences Society event! Not the best snaps but we were too busy hosting to really let loose our photography skills and turn the stage into something to rival the latest D&G shoot.









 

Thanks again to our speaker Peter Riefer, researcher at UCL's Department of Experimental Psychology. Thanks also to all those who attended (big up the prep-year crew!) and to the support received from Yasmine (treasurer), and Ali (secretary). Really pleased to see the society getting off the ground after a bit of a delayed start. Our next event is set for mid April, where LMU lecturer Ian Hancock will be telling us about his time helping to combat the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone last year.

For posterity I'm including the event poster and synopsis. Next event will be bigger and better!

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On Wednesday 3rd of February, the LMU Life Sciences Society will be hosting a free mini-lecture under the banner "Modern Foraging: Exploration and Exploitation in the Supermarket" featuring Peter Riefer, researcher of Experimental Psychology at UCL's Faculty of Brain Sciences, who will be giving a talk on cognitive consumerism: choice exploration, exploitation and how our decision-making strategies develop over time.

1 - 2pm in room TG-30, Wednesday 3rd of February

This event is free to all Life Sciences Society members and non-members alike. Refreshments will be provided.

We hope to see you there!

WOOO! NEW BLOG!

OK, so the desire to record my transition through the biomedical pathway, as they sometimes like to put it, has spilled over into the internet. With any luck, this will blog accumulate into something of a scientific scrap-book, which at best will document my ongoing development and achievements as a budding young scientist, and which at worst may provide a source of chuckling in years to come. Onwards with the first post...

So last month or so was pretty hectic:

First there was setting up the LMU Life Sciences Society, which was more paperwork than anticipated (why did I not anticipate lots of paperwork!?). By early January most of it was done and I’d successfully pressured some peers into becoming members. Some were already asking about what events I had lined up, which was a problem because I didn't have any. Still, I had a cunning plan for getting speakers in. Last year I attended a series of talks hosted by Pint Of Science; an international group that aims to popularise science by putting on cheap events in pubs. In all they put on over 50 events in 3 days in London alone. The schedule on their website thus provided me with a cornucopia of locally based experts who I knew were willing to speak on subjects ranging from cancer to caterpillars, from Mars to microbes. I began sending out emails like a virus-infected computer. All of this was less fun and a much longer process than I had imagined, but the upshot of the whole thing was that the activity of designing the brand-spanking new logo (below) did give me something to procrastinate over as the inexorable march of exams and deadlines loomed ever closer. More on that later.

Last month I also started work experience at the LMU super-lab, where a group of London Met students were taken on after a recruitment process late last year. The scheme demands a minimum of fifteen 4hr shifts over the year and the technicians and lab assistants hope to gradually train us up as a supplement to the work we already do in the lab as part of our course. So far the tasks have mean menial; stock checks, apparatus calibration, health and safety checks, preparing benches for practicals, etc. Hopefully I will be able to find time to give regular updates on the more exciting things we get up to.

I don't want to admit it, but January exams were frustrating. Aside from the step-up in workload from last year, which itself was something of a shock, the exams weren't exactly a walk in the park. After all those hours revising for my Blood Science module (~35hrs since new years), the exam bore nothing on anaemia, no FBC case study, nothing on leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma, leaving lots of rooms for some tricky questions on RBC transmembrane proteins. For Infection Science, which was based on a single URTI case-study, I had been telling everyone beforehand that I'd bet hard cash on S. pyogenes coming up; but then you start having doubts, don't you? What if they ask about Bordetella pertusis? I'll be screwed! As a result I spent a lot of time reading up on rarer conditions; time I probably could have risked revising the usual suspects, Staph. aureus and Strep. pyogenes, but hey-ho. I think I got most of the information down. The marks will tell. Tissue Science went like clockwork, covering apoptosis, necrosis, inflammation, IHC, stains, complement system etc, and Bioanalytical Techniques would have been fine if it weren't for running out of time, leading to a panicked last few minutes trying to scribble an answer to a ridiculously weighted dilution and %age recovery question (worth 1/5th of the whole exam!). The relative simplicity of the question made it absolutely excruciating. Note to self: don't waste time writing in full sentences in future!

Anyway, the message is clear – don't expect to get those easy +90% marks you got last year – consider these socks pulled up!

On top of all this was my usual voluntary weekly sampling of the Thames river, my obligations as both Student academic representative and Study Mentor, the laborious commonplace tasks to keep from perishing, such as foraging for food, cooking, cleaning, washing, etc and to top it all off; endless hours spent editing my CV and application forms as I try to secure an industrial placement for this September. 

...It's also nice to occasionally see friends or catch a movie. Needless to say, the end of the month was very welcome.