Don't Quit Your Day Job

The reason why I have a huge backlog of photos that need to be edited and show reviews that need to be written can be summed up in one word: science.

That shit's been working for me of late. What you non-scientific folks out there need to realize is that 90% of the things you do in lab don't work for one reason or another. It's an insanely frustrating career choice. But when things do start working, it's incredibly rewarding.

Basically, in the last week I've managed to accomplish something that I've been working on for the last four months and that will allow me to actually move on from the "materials" phase of my project and into the "data-collecting" phase. Which is good news indeed.

As for specifically what I managed to do, here goes. I'm studying a certain gene's function, and to do so, I want to know what the protein it makes binds to inside a cell. Pretty much the way any communication happens in an organism is through signalling pathways. It's kind of like a Rube Goldberg machine - you alter one thing, which tweaks another, and so on through 10 or 50 steps until you accomplish the final goal. So basically, what I want to be able to do is to break open cells and specifically pull this protein out, along with whatever happens to be bound to it at that point in time. You can use antibodies to do this, but they can be faulty and not-so-specific for many reasons. So I'm using an engineered tag that doesn't exist naturally, sticking it onto my gene of interest so that it gets made in conjunction with the protein, and then using that tag to pull the protein out of cells.

So how do I do this? The short answer, folks, is magic.