Life of a Lab Rat

dungog , n.

Small cetaceous mammal.

e.g. Dungogs used to frolic off the Point, until we hunted them to extinction. As usual.

On Sunday, the Younger Pawn said to me,

"Daddy, I like your tee-shirt!"

It was merely a freebie from some company or other, with pictures of protein structures on it.

A friend at another Institute in Sydney, whom I shall call 'Lieselotte' (it's not her name, but if you'd had the same education I've had you'd understand), circulated a draft meeting notice to myself and another couple of people. The speaker is my previous boss, from the Made-up Results Centre in Cambridge, whom I shall call 'Bruce'.

Bruce, oddly enough, has not let me know he's coming over. Either I've dropped off his radar because I haven't found enough young, Australian talent to sacrifice send over to do PhDs, or he has taken to trusting in the bush telegraph.

Anyway, I dreamed about going to Bruce's seminar last night. I met him on the way, and he took me aside and talked at me for half an hour. Then he tore off one corner of the seminar notice and wrote down four 'secrets' to his success.

wahroonga ², n.

Large marsupial of genus Macropus.

e.g. Kate says wahroonga fillet is delicious in mushroom sauce.

Nothing to do with life in the lab, except that I came across it when trying to think of a way to put something in my article.

I just read

Microsoft's search excels in spreading malware

Everybody knows that Windows Live Search, Microsoft's little search engine that could, lags far behind Google and Yahoo! in the race to capture eyeballs. Here's one place where the software juggernaut's offering leads the pack: referrals for sites that actively try to infect end users' machines with some of the vilest malware known to man.

wahroonga ¹, n.

Fool or idiot; simpleton.

e.g. It takes a real wahroonga from Admin to jam up the photocopier and then leave it without telling anyone.

You'd have thought that simple questions like "How many genes contain X-type domains?" or even "How many X-type domains are there?" would have been easy to answer, what with the Human Genome Project et al.

Oh hum.

So I'm supposed to be updating an article for the Encyclopedia of Life Sciences. The article is about a certain class of protein domain. After a look through PubMed I googled $PROTEIN_DOMAIN for literary inspiration and realized that $PROTEIN_DOMAIN has a Wikipedia article all to itself.

Oh dear.

I knew Wikipedia was a bit suspect, and laughed out loud at the spoof published in The Register. But now I'm in a position to actually know something about a Wikipedia entry, I'm shocked. The first two sentences, if not actually wrong, are viciously misleading. The first paragraph concludes with another howler. I gave up at that point, except to note how mercifully short the article is and that the author has written another crappy article and re-used the same figure.

The really disturbing thing is that many, many Google searches come up with a Wikipedia article in the first couple of hits. This has distressing implications. I am moved, therefore, to send a friendly warning to Cagéd readers: I am on the Honours Assessment panel this year. Students in the Cage thinking of using Wikipedia as a reference tool should familiarize themselves with the phrase excretus est ex altitudine. Always, always check your sources.

Mind you, in my quest for inspiration I find that some of the more 'learned' websites make similar errors, which is rather disturbing. I'm sure we've all got examples of textbook howlers: Please feel free to post some in the comments. I think I'm in need of a good laugh.

Um, OK.

Which reminds me; I need to pontificate publicly on the principles, pros and pitfalls of particular protocols, with respect to my very young apprentice.

We're starting up a post-doc group in the Cage. We have already had one successful pub meeting, and are planning further events. It is not intended to be a political group, a post-doc union such as you find in the US, but a more of a social/support network. The students have an active social calendar, under the name 'Amoeba'. Nothing similar existed for the backbone of the Cage's research efforts, so we decided to organize ourselves, and decided on the name 'Nematoda' (a tad more advanced and hopefully more organized).

The sentence "A free-swimming roundworm thus looks rather like it is thrashing about aimlessly" also seems depressingly appropriate.

We have a name, so we need a logo. There's a competition running for one. Earlier in the week I came across a lovely picture of a nematode with teeth;

and realized that the mouthparts could easily be modified to reflect the Cage's initials. Here, then, is my entry to the logo competition:

Woolooware™, n.

Kitschy bathroom coverings, inexplicably popular in B&Bs on the South coast of England

Ooh, controversy.

I got my Honours student ('W') to perform the experiment yesterday, and this is just in:

The above is a photograph of an agarose gel, which is used to separate different fragments of DNA. It has been stained with ethidium bromide, which glows under ultraviolet light when bound to DNA.

I came here to write something about teaching, hiding from my student and maybe being careful not to identify people in this weblog, and got distracted.

I appear to have achieved some sort of recognition. "Good Coverage of General Postdoc Issues Award", for the post "Just another whinging postdoc".

Go me?

And he hadn't been here a week, yet.

As good a place as any to record the "freeze-squeeze" method of DNA extraction from gels:

1. Run gel as usual
2. Isolate band using long-wave UV
3. Freeze lump of agarose containing band of interest (upwards of 20 minutes)
4. Place agarose lump in top of SpinX-type spin column, and spin 2 minutes
5. Mush remaining agarose with 200 µl TE and spin 5 minutes
6. Phenol-chloroform extract the flowthrough (use 1:1 volumes)
7. Ethanol precipitate.
8. Resuspend in appropriate volume of water/whatever buffer.

bennelong , adj.
excessive or large; immeasurable.

e.g.
"When did you last see an honest politician?" "Aw mate, it's bennelong time."

This gentleman:

informs me that a llama's gestation period is 11 to 12 months.

He's correct, as it happens, and I wish him and his offspring all the best.

Conversation between fresh-faced young Honours student and myself:

PFY: What primer design program should I use.
BK: Your brain and a pencil and paper. I haven't used a primer design program in over ten years.
PFY: Gosh. I didn't know they existed back then.