The corridor: The plan

Josie pasted this on the wall. We all kiasu go put our names on the paper first to *chup* places once the tables are in.

clearing up the corridor

Today is clear the corridor day. First was to move all the equiptment from the corridor to the heavy equiptment room. No more fridges next to your tables. Got some cleaners to shift all the -20 and 4 and -80's around. Made a good deal of noise.


The lab's three big fridges in a row. But not so convenient now as its all behind the wall. The whole corridor will be for student tables and sitting. Designated clean area. No work to be done in the corridor.... bench work.


The two -20's side by side next to the -80.


Even the shaking incubator that was outside got shifted back.


After the fridges were done, we went on to the tables. Disposed off most of them and kept a few for those who wanted to bring them back home or needed in the animal house. The cleaners actually took away the sofa set and tea table to somewhere for their own enjoyment.


Josie telling them to clear the small ugly ones first. For whatever reason.


Totally cleared, saved the lousy chairs. Now when you walk from one end to the other, it actually feels very far away with so much empty space in between. Your voice will also resonate in the area, almost amounting to an echo (hco) (co) (co) (co) (co)....

The funny thing is you notice the little black spots on the wall? Its where the old tables now gone had this little gap and everybody sitting would stretch out and with thier dirty soles dirty the wall. At first when the tables were removed, everybody was staring at the black spots wondering what it was then one by one they realized its the footprints and burst out laughing.

operation: Corridor

Got a love note from Josie today, pasted on my table. I'm reserved! (turn a blind eye to the give away bit):


Well, at least better than Terror Teren's:


So the corridor will be upgraded from tomorrow. Workers will first remove the old furniture. Then put in new power plugs and network points, then put in new lights and then paint the whole darn place up (not in pink) and finally put the new tables. And guess what, we're getting new chairs! Send those blasted rubber ones back to the *ahem* office and let their butts test it out. So the corridor is cleared, clearer than anyone can remember(that shows that everybody here is young...heheh..).


Two tables for our temporary use shifted into the lab. Notice the new acrylic water splash shield and the new research assistant trying hard to look busy?


Everybody, say hello to Fi!! Sorry about the bad shot but she's abit shy.

Grow your own bladder

Bio-engineered bladders successful in patients

• 00:01 04 April 2006
• NewScientist.com news service
• Roxanne Khamsi

Bladders engineered in the laboratory from patients' own cells and then implanted into the body have succeeded in their first clinical trial.

The feat was accomplished by Anthony Atala, at Wake Forest University Medical School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and his colleagues. He says that while scientists have had success with skin transplants grown on scaffolds in the past, this is the first time they have grown and transplanted a discrete, complex organ.

The success is the culmination of an idea that the team began exploring 16 years ago. Atala adds that they are also working on growing bio-engineered hearts and pancreases in the lab.

To create the new bladders, the researchers took a biopsy from patients whose bladders functioned poorly due to an inherited nervous system disorder. The team then placed muscle cells and cells from the bladder lining on a biodegradable bladder-shaped scaffold and allowed them to grow for about two months.

The scaffolds were made of the structural protein collagen, in some cases adding polyglycolic acid, a polymer used in surgical sutures.

Major milestone

The team then transplanted these new bladders into their patients in a delicate operation and monitored their recovery. Two of the patients did not provide follow-up information. But Atala’s group did track the progress of seven patients, aged between 4 and 19 years, for an average of nearly four years.

The patients with the bio-engineered bladders gained better urinary control. The improvements were similar to those resulting from standard surgery that relies on intestinal grafts to fix the bladder. But the new technique does not require any damage to the intestine, the researchers note.

“Atala and his colleagues should be praised for the milestone they have reached, but further multi-institutional studies are needed with longer follow-up,” writes Steve Chung, of the Advanced Urology Institute of Illinois in Spring Valley, Illinois, in a commentary on the study appearing in the Lancet. Until then, he adds, surgery using intestinal tissue to repair the bladder “remains the gold standard”.

Bladder disease does not only cause urinary control problems but can lead to kidney damage. At present, reconstructive surgery is often performed to treat severe bladder problems.

This procedure involves grafting tissue from a section of the small intestine or stomach. But medical experts say that many complications can arise from this type of procedure.

Journal reference: Lancet (DOI: 10.1016/S0140-673(06)68438-9)

Honours poster

Today the honours students got their second poster round. 3 of 4 of the lab's students were there. Some pics:


Yadda yadda yadda...and so you see, it is clear that because the amino acid here interacts with the viral RNA there and the long chain fatty acid here is cleaved by that lipase, therefore I should win the Nobel prize. Yes?


The rule of thumb here is...


Looking good. Yes, I said looking good.


Looking stressed out


Does not look impressed.


Really does not look impressed.


A minor crowd in a stuffy room.

Mmmm ... Healthy Bacon

By Rhitu Chatterjee
ScienceNOW Daily News
27 March 2006

Move over bacon, now there's something healthier. A team of researchers has created a transgenic pig that produces higher-than-normal levels of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids. This could make pork a good alternative to fish for cardiovascular health, as well as provide a model system for studying the effects of these fatty acids on human diseases.

Omega-3, or n-3, fatty acids are a group of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), well known for their benefits to human health. Fish are the richest source of n-3 fatty acids, but the potential for mercury contamination makes eating some fish products risky. Researchers have tried to enhance the content of grains, but livestock have not been a viable alternative so far. Pigs, cows, and other farm animals contain low levels of n-3 fatty acids and high levels of another group of PUFAs called omega-6, or n-6, fatty acids. And that, in fact, is a problem: This high n-6/n-3 ratio is known to contribute to the incidence of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and depression in humans.

Now, researchers have found a way to improve this ratio. The trick was inserting a gene from the Caenorhabditis elegans worm into the pig genome. The gene, called fat-1, codes for an enzyme that converts n-6 to n-3. A team led by Yifan Dai of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania popped the gene into the DNA in pig fibroblast nuclei and transferred these fibroblast nuclei into pig oocytes. One more set of nuclear transfers later, and the team got eight transgenic piglets. The pigs produce 3 times more n-3 fatty acids and 23% less n-6 fatty acids than normal pigs, giving the new breed a 5-fold lower n-6/n-3 ratio, the researchers reported online yesterday in Nature Biotechnology.

"I just think it's a great technical achievement," says Michael Roberts, a bovine reproductive biologist at the University of Missouri (UM), Columbia, who was not associated with this study. He cautions, however, that further studies on the quality and safety of the meat, as well as the health of the cloned animals, will need to be done before people can buy heart-healthy bacon at their local supermarket. "It's going to be a long time before such animals are able to enter the food chain," he says.

For now, co-author Randy Prather of UM, says these transgenic pigs could serve as good models for studying the effects of higher n-3 fatty acid levels on cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases. Researchers may be able to determine, for example, if higher levels of n-3 fatty acids could override the harmful effects of high fat diet on the cardiovascular fitness of the pigs, he says.