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.

Today the hearse came for the old faithful -20 chest freezer. It's gone!!!


And today they finally switched on the new air conds and look at the windows 2 hours after the machines are on. The heavy machine room are freezing but the corridor still abit warm. Still, its a vast improvement from before. The lab is cool at last!

IQ scores reflect brain structure

Nature
Published online: 29 March 2006; | doi:10.1038/440588b

Scans suggest IQ scores reflect brain structure

Research results reignite intelligence controversy.

Jim Giles

Researchers say that a remarkable data set on the developing brain adds to the idea that IQ is a meaningful concept in neuroscience. The study, which is published in this issue, suggests that performance in IQ tests is associated with changes in the brain during adolescence.

Claims that IQ is a valid measure of intelligence tend to attract angry responses, in part because of studies that have attempted to link group differences in IQ with race. In their 1994 book The Bell Curve, political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard Herrnstein argued that the lower-income status of some US ethnic minorities was linked to below-average IQ scores among those groups. These were in turn attributed to mainly genetic factors.

Before that, Harvard University entomologist Edward Wilson provoked outrage with work that proposed evolutionary explanations for human behaviour and individual differences in intelligence; critics called the work racist. And this month, the journal Intelligence printed an editorial note defending its policy regarding the publication of controversial papers. The note comes after a study linking IQ and skin colour (D. I. Templer and H. Arikawa Intelligence 34, 121–139; 2006), published online last November, prompted a string of complaints from scientists.

Yet researchers studying IQ say the social climate is becoming more receptive to such studies, in part because it is now widely agreed that cognitive abilities are shaped by environmental factors as well as genetic ones.

The latest result, from a team led by Philip Shaw at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, adds to the debate by linking IQ with changes in the brain over time, rather than fixed attributes such as brain size. "It's not that brainy children have more grey matter," says Shaw. "The story of intelligence is in the trajectory of brain development."

Shaw's team tracked a group of more than 300 children as they aged from 6 to 19, running them through a series of cognitive tests — IQ is determined by combining scores from tests of a range of verbal and non-verbal abilities. The team also measured the size of brain structures using magnetic resonance imaging at roughly two-year intervals: more than half the children had at least two scans, and around a third were scanned three or more times.

When the researchers split the children into three groups according to their initial IQ scores, they noticed a characteristic pattern of changes in the brains of the group with the highest scores. The thickness of the cortex — the outer layer of the brain that controls high-level functions such as memory — started off thinner than that of the other groups, but rapidly gained depth until it was thicker than normal during the early teens. All three groups converged, with the children having cortexes of roughly equal thickness by age 19. The strongest effect was seen in the prefrontal cortex, which controls planning and reasoning.

"My first impression was 'wow, this is amazing," says Jeremy Gray, a psychologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He notes that it is difficult to persuade children and parents to return for scans over a long period of time, so imaging studies are usually limited to tens, rather than hundreds, of subjects.

Shaw's study raises questions that could prompt further research. His team did not look at what could be causing the changes in cortical thickness, for example; the group points out that several mechanisms — including the formation and elimination of connections between brain cells — could be responsible. Also unknown is how genetic and environmental factors contribute to the change.

The study is likely to prompt discussion of the possible social applications of such results, but these are limited. The trend identified by Shaw was significant when results from all the subjects were combined, but would probably be too small to predict how an individual child is likely to fare in school, for example.

There are also likely to be queries about whether the research should have been conducted in the first place. IQ is a good predictor of performance at school and in the workplace. For some neuroscientists, this makes the physiological factors that contribute to IQ worth studying, in order to probe how intelligence works. "There's good evidence from functional imaging studies that very demanding tasks activate the prefrontal cortex, and that activity correlates with IQ," says Shaw. "We're getting at some common processing resource."

Gray also points out that metrics related to IQ can help predict speed of recovery from stroke, so studying them could lead to new therapies. But for many others, the concept of linking IQ and intellect remains socially dangerous and scientifically dubious. Steven Rose, a neuroscientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, says performance on cognitive tasks depends on a large range of factors, from emotive state to recall ability, and that the "IQ approach ignores all of these". He adds that even as a predictor of ability in school it has traditionally been put to negative ends — to weed out, rather than help, less able children. "We shouldn't go back to measures developed in the 1900s," he says.

painted

Painting has begun and ended as I post this.

First coat done in main lab:


First coat done in main lab:


Poor fishies, wondering why the sky turned black suddenly:


First coat done in prof's room:


I spy with my eye from the door a guy diligently painting:


Done painting, now comes the rearranging:


Just looking at the amount of stuff the lab has makes me tired already. It really saves alot of time instead of working out to get tired. Same end point.


Done the rearrangement, room 04:


Done, room 04:


Done, room 05:


Its really really pink:

painting

Today we cleared the stuff in the lab away from the walls for tomorrow's painting project. Found much 'hidden treasure' underneath boxes and cupboards and trays. And its only now that you realize how much stuff the lab actually has accumulated over the years.











Oh well, another long day of shifting the stuff back to its original places will come very soon...

Prof's Bday

Yes, this may surprise you but your boss does has a birthday too. So we went to Genki Sushi and bought her a cake.

We had 3 tables. Table one was the 'conveyor belt crazy' people:


They had many many little dishes for lunch


We sat next to the preparation area and there was this rice making machine. Pretty cool, making all those rice blocks. Wonder if they make bricks the same way...


Dr. J demonstrating the skill of eating rubbish:


The bento table: all bentos, no convyor:


poser!!!


Lu didnt break his own record though...


Dr. J competes Lu:


After the ritualistic sing-song thingy, the cutting part came:


Refused to eat his cake whil;e the cam is pointed in his direction: