Life of a Lab Rat

I'm back!

And my cells are fine, mad props to P for looking after them, my lovely, lovely babies.

Here's a rather weird picture that I captured earlier today, of what appears to be a dividing cell in one of my transfection cloning plates:

The green is the nucleus (expressing my splicing factor) and the purply colour is the surrounding cellular stuff (the colour is just for contrast. Grey is boring).

But look at the shape of that nucleus! And the nobbly bits on the end! Just what is going on here? It's similar to the multinucleation I've been seeing (and saw lots of this morning), but stretched out rather than spread around. Maybe it is a precursor form?

Answers, please, on the back of an email to the usual place.

In sort-of related news, we have finally received a gene trap embryonic stem cell line (ordered a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away). And, frustratingly, the trap appears to truncate the message right near the end, rather than somewhere sensible like the second intron. Bah. The good news is that another gene trap line has become available in the meantime, which would seem to truncate the message somewhere that could be very useful indeed. Hmm . . .