![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
New job details
Aug. 4th, 2008 10:35 amSo, meant to post yesterday with more details, but that just didn't happen. Sorry!
The lab I'll be working in starting 8/18 is a protein lab; they mostly do crystallography stuff. But there's this new project up that the prof basically wants me to head/direct/do/etc. Here's the scoop: Now that we know the sequence of, e.g. the Drosophila genome (that's your summer friend and mine, the fruit fly), we know there's a lotta proteins going on. There's a class of proteins called receptors, which basically let cells give and receive messages to and from other cells. But the thing is, we haven't any idea in a lot of cases of receptors of just what proteins on the other cells they bind to - their ligands are as yet unknown. We call these receptors 'orphans'.
My project is to hunt for possible binding partners for these orphan receptors. It'll involve bioinformatics (sequence-staring to identify extracellular proteins that have a particular domain in them), possibly cDNA synthesis and amplification, cloning the cDNAs into Invitrogen's Gateway system and then popping the coding regions from the initial Gateway to other vectors which will be used for expressing them, transforming Drosophila cells with the expression constructs, and running a whole heck of a lot of co-immunoprecipitation experiments in all possible combinations of about a hundred proteins to start with.
When I told nezumiko about the project the other day, her response was, "Oh, you're going to be a paparazzi biologist." I've realized, not so much. What I'm doing is more like a massive dating service: put a protein together with each of a hundred other proteins, and see who it likes.
Exciting! Very very different! I'll have to take active thought about what I'm doing a lot more, since I'll be basically in charge of this project. Eeek! And I have a heckuva lot to learn, really fast. But.. exciting! And scary, of course. But really neat.
The lab I'll be working in starting 8/18 is a protein lab; they mostly do crystallography stuff. But there's this new project up that the prof basically wants me to head/direct/do/etc. Here's the scoop: Now that we know the sequence of, e.g. the Drosophila genome (that's your summer friend and mine, the fruit fly), we know there's a lotta proteins going on. There's a class of proteins called receptors, which basically let cells give and receive messages to and from other cells. But the thing is, we haven't any idea in a lot of cases of receptors of just what proteins on the other cells they bind to - their ligands are as yet unknown. We call these receptors 'orphans'.
My project is to hunt for possible binding partners for these orphan receptors. It'll involve bioinformatics (sequence-staring to identify extracellular proteins that have a particular domain in them), possibly cDNA synthesis and amplification, cloning the cDNAs into Invitrogen's Gateway system and then popping the coding regions from the initial Gateway to other vectors which will be used for expressing them, transforming Drosophila cells with the expression constructs, and running a whole heck of a lot of co-immunoprecipitation experiments in all possible combinations of about a hundred proteins to start with.
When I told nezumiko about the project the other day, her response was, "Oh, you're going to be a paparazzi biologist." I've realized, not so much. What I'm doing is more like a massive dating service: put a protein together with each of a hundred other proteins, and see who it likes.
Exciting! Very very different! I'll have to take active thought about what I'm doing a lot more, since I'll be basically in charge of this project. Eeek! And I have a heckuva lot to learn, really fast. But.. exciting! And scary, of course. But really neat.
