The security people at Dutch airports are so invasive, that they even put their hands under my underwear. Maybe they are all gay.
I'll be avoiding boarding at Dutch airports in the future, and advise everyone to do the same.
Jos Arents just informed me that the experiment done yesterday didn’t really work out. It seems that the transformation of pHluorin to the XL1blue and DE21(DE3) E. Coli strains didn’t seem to work out, as there’s no visible inidication of the fluorescent protein being there.
Today I had a chance to look at ways they are keeping yeast and bacteria and similar organisms active for extended periods of time. The idea is that you have to control their apetite for replication, have to provide them food and clean their excrement. This is all done the way you’d think from a 1950’s movie: tubes lead in and out of a container, carefully controlled to provide growth inhibitors, nutrients and get the unneeded stuff out.
Quite interesting and elaborate, actually.
It seems that the results for the experiments done so far are not pointing in a positive direction. In some strains the fluorescence is just not visible to the human eye. In others, it seems that while the appropriate DNA is there, it’s just not expressed, so the fluorescent protein it should build is just not around.
Today we put them to a test again, to see if the two DNA sections put into the same bacteria are interfering with each other. We’ll see tomorrow.
It’s also hard to pinpoint which fluorescent protein is visible enough to the naked eye. In research, the results are measured by sensitive apparatus, so there it’s good enough if the differences in fluorescence are minuscule, but still picked up by these machines. But here we’re aiming for a display tailored at humans.
Given the fixed timeframe of this project, we don’t have the liberty to engineer the proteins and DNA we need. But it seems that the ones we’d need are just not there at the moment.
I’ve just posted a page describing my ventures into cross-platform C++ development using CMake and Eclipse CDT. The results are mostly based on the CMake - Eclipse tutorial, and also on some experimentation / verification on my own. The post includes a description and a code sample that is a little OpenGL application that compiles & runs on all Linux, Mac OS and Windows - including development using and IDE, interactive debugging among other things.
It’s always funny to work on multiple platforms at the same time - this is something I always liked actually.
It seems that for the TorA-GFPmut3* GFP, which we’re trying to control by pH change, the excitation wavelength (color) is just too close to the emitted light for a human eye to see.
Yesterday and today with Maarten de Smit we’ve prepared an experiment that we can do tomorrow, and see if we can really turn the glow in the bacteria on and off - thus creating a bio-pixel.
Meanwhile, Jos Arents at the University of Amsterdam as preparing the first plates with the bacteria that could have the same effect - but triggered by light. He’ll have the plates grow out hopefully tomorrow as well.
Hogy ne csak beszéjünk róla, telepítettem OpenID plugin-t a blog.meetup.hu -ra. Így most már tetszőleges OpenID-val be lehet lépni jól…