Fall '09: Week 1 in Review

Week 1 was a short week. Technically classes started on Thursday, but I went in Wednesday to talk to my new supervisor about what my research project was going to be about, and do various other administrative things.

So, here's the review:

Supervised study

• Read the grant proposal for the project I'll be working on (invasion mechanisms of Salmonella
• Found out which aspect I'll be working on
• Signed and turned in all necessary forms and got approved for the course
• Got a look at the confocal microscope I'll be working on. Confocal microscopes are really cool. You take a cell that has some proteins that have been marked with fluorescent markers, and it uses a laser to excite the markers in thin slices covering the whole cell, and then it uses the slices to build a 3-D image that you can then look at. *Very* exciting.
• Was given two papers to read. Read the first and most of the second.

Animal Development

• Going to be looking at morphological and molecular aspects of development
• Prof acts like a teenybopper, anthropomorphises and makes cutesy statements about how chicks are easy model organisms for developments, "but I hope there aren't too many 'easy chicks' in here!"
• Some history of the field
• 250 people in this class, taught in one of the less comfortable auditoriums
• Pretty sure I'm going to drop this one

Molecular Aspects of Plant Development

• Prof is actually a grown-up, and expects us to be
• About 30 people in the class
• Learned about tools to track molecular events in cell at three levels:
  • Gene expression: take the promoter for the gene of interest, put a marker after it instead of the gene, put that complex in a vector and transfect the cell, scan for the marker. Marker is something that will fluoresce, like GFP, or GUS, which has an easy histochemical assay. Need to find out what "histochemical" means.
  • mRNA localization: take tissue, fix it in an RNA-preserving fixative, make labeled probes for the mRNA in question, marinate, wash, scan. Probes show up where the mRNA is.
  • Protein localization: There are two ways to do this.
    1. Immunolocalization: Fix tissue, make antibodies for the protein in question, marinate, wash. Then take other antibodies that bind to the conserved section of teh first antibodies and are tagged. Marinate, wash, scan. The tagged antibodies will show up where the protein is.
    2. Tagging: take the promoter/gene complex for the gene in question, stick the gene for a marker like GFP or GUS after it. Transfect the cell, scan for the marker. The marker will be attached to the protein and will show you where the protein is (unless the marker has interfered with folding or function of the protein).
• Was assigned two papers for next class. Total of 33 pages of reading. Yeep!

And that's all the classes for this week. Because it was a short week I didn't have any classes for Community Ecology and Evolutionary Biology or Intro to Health Studies: Plagues and Peoples. I'll tell you all about it next week.

I'm also devising some good systems for organizing my life. I started a new major knitting project to bring to class with me, and I've realized that I'm going to be doing a buttload of article-reading this semester, and that's just as easy to do on a treadmill as at a desk, so maybe I'll spend less time sitting. We'll see.

Knitblogging III - Christmas is a'coming and there's yarn in the air

I was looking over this blog and I realized I haven't knitblogged in for*ever*. Well there's a reason for this.

Since Christmas is on its way, most of what I'm knitting now is gifts. Since I don't know which of my family members read this blog, I don't want to report on what I've made until it's been distributed. Don't worry, though, I'll be taking plenty of pictures before I give things away, so you'll get to see what's what.

For now I'll just give you a teaser and say that all my presents are being made from the coloured versions of Cascade Yarns' Eco wool



Purty colours!

Knitblogging, a reference post

Because Blogger doesn't have the option of creating categories, the way WordPress does, and because I want a way to collect all the posts about one subject into a single link I can put on the sidebar, I'm creating this post. I'll put a link to this post in the sidebar, and every time I blog about knitting I'll put a link to the post in this post, at the top of the list.

• Christmas Teaser
• Slipper Socks
• Rogue!

Oh, and when I finished the Rogue, I promised a picture of myself wearing it, and then never delivered. Well, here it is:

Knitblogging, part II - Slipper Socks.

When I was in the 11th grade my class went on a canoe trip in Algonquin Park. Because it was autumn, cooling down, and likely to rain, my mother loaned me a pair of heavy wool socks. Wool, she said, was essential for this sort of trip, because it retained its ability to insulate even when wet. These socks, she said, would keep my feet warm even if I fell out of the canoe (although she made no promises about the rest of my body). So I wore the socks, night and day, for the full three (or was it four?) days of the trip. I loved them. True to my mother's word, these socks stayed warm even when drenched. We won't discuss what they smelled like by the time we got back to Toronto. I loved the socks so much that when I moved to Montreal a year and a half later, I asked my mother if I could take them with me. She had two pairs, and so was happy to let me have one. I kept wearing these socks. I wore them in the house, in place of slippers; I wore them inside my oxblood, steel-toed Doc Martins (which are very sexy, but don't insulate very well, and are too big for me besides). I wore them inside my hikers during winter, because I'm too cheap and lazy to buy proper winter boots. I wore these socks all the freaking time. I figured they were heavy wool, they could take it. Well, they are heavy wool, and they did take a lot, but eventually they started to lose their battle with friction. The bottoms started to go at the heel, and then at the ball, and eventually they made very poor slippers, because they let my bare heel come into full contact with the cold wood floor. I wasn't ready to throw them out (they still did a good job of keeping my feet warm under the blankets on particularly cold nights), but I was forced to admit that I was going to need a new pair.

I waffled. Being cheap and lazy, and hating shopping in general, I wasn't inclined to buy a new pair. Then, a little over a year ago, I took up knitting again in earnest, and that reinforced my desire not to buy a new pair. After all, I could knit a pair! But I didn't. Every sock pattern I looked at was either intended for a much lighter yarn, or waayy too complicated, or both. I got increasingly frustrated with the situation, but then my aunt got me a pair of fleece slipper socks for christmas, and that held my frustration in check for a while. But only for a while. The fleece socks, while nice, couldn't hold a candle to the look and feel of socks made from real, heavy, good quality wool.

Finally it happened. I had finished the Rogue. I was casting around for a new project. My confidence in my knitting skill was high. I had some spare, good, heavy wool yarn on hand. And I came across this pattern. At first I wasn't sure, but once I looked at the pattern and realised how trivial it would be to get rid of the godawful moon-and-stars design I was sold. I did it. It took about a week. I am now the proud owner of an incredibly comfy pair of slipper socks, pictured below:



Here's a detail shot of the heel. The picture links to some notes on the construction.


The slipper socks were made from Knitting Pure and Simple's free pattern, on 3.75mm Brittany birch needles, with Cascade Yarns's Ecological Wool, shade 8061 which just happens to be almost the same colour as the original wool socks my mother gave me all those years ago.

Rogue!

The Rogue is finished. It's been nearly a year since I started it, and now it's done well before the weather turns cold again.

It was my first attempt at cabling, but I think I did okay. Check out the sleeve:


And the side panel:


For more pictures of the work in progress you can check out my Flickr set here.

I'll post a picture of myself wearing it on Monday when I'm back in Montreal.