I just sent my lab supervisor an email with an attachment named “chicken limb spreadsheet.xls”
What is even the deal with my life nowadays
About
I'm a kid who is interested in too many things, and sometimes I like to blather about those things.
I'm doing my undergrad in evolutionary biology at McGill University in Montreal. I hope to be a renegade palaeontologist/illustrator thingy extraordinaire someday.
I'm doing my undergrad in evolutionary biology at McGill University in Montreal. I hope to be a renegade palaeontologist/illustrator thingy extraordinaire someday.
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Qualitative data yeah boiiii
Poorly Worded Developmental Biology Digest of the Day
Because you haven’t in a while, here, have some of my science. Preliminary science.
My project this semester is doing fluorescent dye injections in chicken embryo limb buds as part of the cell fate-mapping my supervisor is doing. Basically I’m investigating patterns of mesenchyme (squishy, undifferentiated tissue) movement along the anterior-posterior axis (top-bottom in the photos) through certain stages in development.*
The left image is the limb bud immediately after injection, while the embryo is still in the egg, and the right image is the same limb two days later, when the embryo was extracted. In both cases, the limb is pointing to the right, with the “shoulder” region on the left. The reddish colour represents the fluorescent dye (DiI), as it stains cells early in development, which then divide outwards as the limb grows.
Right now my work is concetrated on getting the injections to be smaller. The reddish dot in the first photo would ideally be about half that size, and this is largely a matter of good technique. I’m also trying to get the imaging to work better, but unfortunately there’s not much you can do about a microscope with a jury-rigged stage that’s made out of a spoon:
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* Hamburger & Hamilton stages 20-22, and 22-26
Science rage
Yeah I thought the idea was funny too
That was before I broke two glass capillary needles with my palm and before all but one of my ten embryos died in a couple hours for no apparent reason and before I had to spend an hour waiting for a solution to emulsify and before I couldn’t get this fucking fluorescent microscope to focus whatsoever and before I was doing this for a project due in under three months and I’ve been at this single, very clearly laid out, obviously doable protocol for almost a month with literally no results because of every single tiny thing that could go wrong going wrong
ha ha
ha
ha
Today in “Edna Explains Stuff That Actually, Really Happens in Their Mad Science Lab”: Retinoic acid beading.
I pulled these images from a 1985 paper* as they’re some of the clearest visualizations of a protocol that a couple volunteers in the lab are trying to get working. The protocol involves inserting a bead of retinoic acid into the limb bud of a chick embryo and allowing it to develop. Among others, you can get results like image “D” above (compared to the normal limb “A”): a direct mirror image of the digits - two “hands” on the same arm.
In the posterior part of the developing limb bud, there’s a region called the zone of polarizing activity (ZPA) that controls the development of the digits through various signalling pathways, most importantly the sonic hedgehog (shh) protein**. The ZPA particularly contributes to the differentiation of separate digits (antero-posterior development).
If a bead of retinoic acid is inserted into the anterior part of the limb bud, opposite the ZPA which is in the posterior part, it will essentially induce a secondary ZPA. The signalling of this second ZPA will create a second set of digits mirroring the first. Also notice that in image D, the distal (farthest from body) ends of the forearm both resemble an ulna rather than the normal ulna and radius.
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* Tickle, C. 1985. A Quantitative Analysis of the Effect of all-trans-Retinoic Acid on the Pattern of Chick Wing Development. Dev. Biol. 109, 82-95
** yes seriously it’s called that
Edna further ignores people-science
I dropped my intro phsyiology for next semester because I got into Animal Diversity, which is coordinated and taught by my sort-of-supervisor/prof, Hans Larsson. I am so pumped. There’s a lab section for this class that’s IN THE MUSEUM which I can only assume means lookin’ at cool fossils and shit?
Ponderous
I’m sitting here drinking tea, eating yoghurt, listening to dubstep (I know, I’m ashamed of me too), working on a fish ecology assignment, and thinking about the future.
Next summer is shaping up to be pretty awesome, no matter what happens with the Tyrrell Museum. Applications open in late December-early January, and I cannot. Fucking. Wait. If I get the job, then fuck yeah, working with dinosaurs in Drumheller for four months, enjoying the badland heat, and spending my time off in Edmonton with some of my favourite people.
If I don’t get the position, then I’ll be doing a vertebrate paleontology field course with my prof in May, followed by more development lab work, probably including a project of my own. Even better would be if Max could come stay with me for a while in Montreal, and I could then live(!) with one of my favourite people. Then it’d be back to Edmonton for a few weeks in July/August.
So either way - all the fuck yeahs in the world are not nearly enough.
I think I’ve also decided to be a paleontologist who is also an illustrator, rather than an illustrator who is also a scientist, because that doesn’t quite work as well. I find myself still getting increasingly excited about the field the more I learn about and meet people in it, which I didn’t think was possible. And really, there’s nothing I’ve wanted to be longer than I’ve wanted to be a paleontologist (except maybe an astronaut, or Charizard).
The best part
About being a volunteer in this lab right now that it is literally all the fun of high school science labs without any of the work.
Under loose supervision, I follow slightly unclear protocol, make adjustments as I go along, and maybe I’ll get results, maybe not. Everybody knows what the protocol is supposed to achieve, but whether or not it does is a little up in the air, and that’s okay. I get to try interesting things, and build interesting things, and then talk about the interesting things I’ve worked with. And then you know what I don’t have to do when I leave the lab? Write up a report about it. Hah.
Might be a little more work next semester, when I’ll actually be doing research and won’t just be around to iron out the kinks in various protocols my supervisor needs. But then it’ll go on my CV as, “Completed totally badass research project in Redpath Museum Lab at 18. Signed, Awesome Paleontologist Dudes.”
Today.
- roll out of bed inhumanly early
- eat weird nectarines and cereal
- arrive at my lab and end up waiting outside the locked door for 20min
- get into my lab and set some beeswax to melt
- get a large mocha
- drink the large mocha while windowing three chick eggs
- set up the time-lapse camera for the embryos
- go to my class and tutorial
- eat lunch and discuss the finer points of William Shatner’s music
- take pictures of embryos
- write a paper about beans and gibberellic acid
- take pictures of embryos
- watch out of tall, skinny windows as clouds gather, downtown fades into a dense fog, hail hits the building, and a thunderstorm rolls by
- take pictures of embryos
- show boyfriend embryos
- get dinner
- head over to watch a documentary about asexuality
- go home
- cuddle and watch The West Wing
Wet Lab - 10
It’s been a while since I wrote about my lab stuff, mostly because I haven’t had internet at home for about two weeks and also because it’s been fairly repetitive for the last month or so. (Quick recap: I am putting teflon windows into chicken eggs and crossing my fingers for a higher-than-50% survival rate.)
This week I finally got one of the in ovo embryos to live from Monday up till today (Thursday), and remain in frame under the window, without the alantois getting inbetween the window and the embryo. Basically - it could actually be used for imaging for an entire three days, and this is awesome. It’s also the longest-living embryo I’ve had so far.
My basic change was new, non-expired penicillin-streptomycin for all the embryos. Larsson himself in all his sciencey wonderment also dropped by the lab and suggested that I start leaving a small layer of very dilute PBS solution on the windows, as he thought the embryos might just be dying due to sheer dehydration. So I tried that. And they all died. So I’m not going to do that anymore.
Also! We have new animal things in our lab space (which is getting way crowded). Not only do we have dead, de-scaled gars in our freezer, we also put in a tank full of daphnia, and a batch of polypterids. POLYPTERIDS. I get to do science next to a tank full of WALKING FISH, YOU GUYS.
