We have arrived to the end of the summer. When we first arrived nine weeks ago I remember George saying that there was an open challenge for anyone who could directly observe the interaction of the contractile proteins actin and myosin working within the cleavage furrow of a cell dividing. The idea that something as fundamental as cell division was not fully understood really go under my skin. Life as we know it including growth and development of organisms, tissue repair, and reproduction depend on cell division. When it goes wrong you can end up with too many or too few chromosomes and its failure has been linked to cancer. George also mentioned that although our understanding of cell division has undoubtedly improved in the last few decades that there were examples from nature which are hard to explain. This could mean one of two things. Cell division is a universally conserved feature of all animal cells and our understanding of cell division is not as complete as it could be or cells have evolved different ways to use the same core components. From the beginning of this summer I have been driven by these questions George asked. Today I had the opportunity to present my findings to the wider scientific community. It was really fun to discuss my research to other scientists.
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Our final posters are due this week with the poster session coming up next week. I sat down with George to analyze the data we have collected over the summer. One of the things that I love most about working in this lab is that all of our data is visual. We made several montages from movies we had taken and kymographs, a type of image we produce that shows spatial position over time in which a spatial axis represents time. George does a lot of his image processing with ImageJ. It seems like a great program because it is free, open source, and designed for scientific images. The fact that it is open source means that people can actually write plug-ins to do specific things. A lot of scientists use it, so there are heaps of plug-ins for all kinds of processes.
This summer I have been introduced to several free, open source programs that seem to be widely used by the scientific community including Rstudio a free statistics program. Ross Whippo, a PhD student in Arron Galloway’s lab taught a workshop on using R. You can find out more about Ross, and even see the notes from the workshop he taught on this website https://rosswhippo.com/. When we have lunches with researchers one of the questions I have been asking them is “what skills are highly desired in labs?” or “what skills are highly transferable between labs and worth learning?” Over and over they have mentioned learning statistics software, especially R. They have said that many undergrads do not have much statistics and experimental design experience when they apply to graduate school and that developing those skills early is helpful when applying and when getting started actually designing graduate research. Another program I’ve been exposed to here is QGIS. The OIMB library has offered a number of workshops this summer, in addition to a monthly journal club and a book club. A few weeks ago our library hosted Dean Walton, the science reference librarian from the University of Oregon main campus. He taught a short workshop on yet another powerful open source software called QGIS, a rival to ARCGIS the premiere geographic information systems (GIS) software. We took a 1939 aerial photograph of the area where OIMB is and georeferenced the historic photo to current satellite imagery. The first impression was of how much the area had changed, especially with the development of the marina. GIS is a wonderful tool for showing data that has a spatial component to it. This week he will be leading a workshop on photogrammetry for making 3D models of landscapes and specimens which I plan on attending. Everyone is busy working on their posters but that does not mean we did not have enough time to celebrate the Invertebrate Ball last night. Everyone dresses up as their favorite invertebrate and walks down the catwalk. This tradition has been around for a long time and it was really fun. Dear reader, If you have come along on this journey with me you will know that even though they are technically brainless, the jellyfish have continued to outsmart me all summer. The gorgon Medusa extracting her final revenge on me of all people. I have learned several important lessons over the weeks here. Firstly, write everything down! Note taking is essential to keeping an accurate record and invaluable for going back to understand what happened during an experiment. Secondly I did not imagine research could be such a roller coaster! The ups and downs, when something starts to work and then does not, then you seem on the edge of a break though again, can be tiring. Working all day long on a problem, day after day can also be a drain, especially when nothing you do seems to work. Experimental science requires a lot of persistence and troubleshooting. That’s what makes it so challenging and rewarding at the same time. This weekend we will be presenting our research to a general audience at the Charleston Marine Life Center. I am looking forward to this. When I went out jellyfishing today I had the aim to catch as many different species as possible. I caught at least 12 species and have prepared a wide dish with a few individuals of each. My goal is to have children look in the dish and try to see how many different kinds they can recognize. Some of the differences are quite subtle so it should make for a good observation game. I will also have eggs, planula, polyps and medusae to demonstrate the life cycle of Clytia gregaria, my main research species. And of course I will be showing the movies and images we have managed to capture of unilateral cell division in embryos. Ps I have recently finished a book about jellyfish called Spineless: The science of jellyfish and the art of growing a backbone by Juli Berwald. It is an entertaining account of one woman’s fascination with jellyfish and an impressive summary of current research on jellyfish worldwide.
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AuthorMy name is Philip Aspinall, and I am a student at Sierra College in Grass Valley, California. The first time I peered into a microscope and found an entire, complex, beautiful world below the visible, I was transfixed. I am thankful for George von Dassow and Svetlana Maslakova for allowing me to work in their lab, and to Geroge for his generosity with his time and for being my mentor this summer. Archives
August 2019
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