First day in lab...

Great first day in lab! After getting all of the paper work done, we started our day christening the new lab chairs! As i told them, they will spend lot of time at there desks documenting their work so they should be as comfortable as possible. We talked about keeping a lab notebooks, the new printer/scanner/copier/fax, and a few other topics before heading to the balance room to validate the pipets they will be using all summer...1 bad out of 8 is not too troublesome...we even have an extra p5000, so not a problem at this time. After a fine lunch at the local Chinese restaurant, we discussed buffers. These guys actually remembers the technical aspects of buffers...thanks Audra. We proceeded to the lab to make some buffers...along the way talking about RO and nanopure water. All in all a great day...i hope they agree!

CREATE...

Create...this is what we were told by one of our commencement speakers Amy Shapiro, a fine arts teacher at Bolingbrook High School. "Create something" she said; this feels like a good motto for our summer research efforts. Now Dr. Shapiro is an artist, so "creating" works of art is what artist do, but as a scientist we create knowledge! Go forth and create...

My first entry..

I am honored to be working on campus this summer with Ben Battenburg and Blake Lyon with support from a Cottrell College Science Award (received from Research Corporation for the Advancement of Science) and Monmouth College. The award is for a two year period, which started in Jan 2009.

The title of the Grant is "ESR Investigation of the Peroxidase Activity of Modified Cytochrome c" the abstract reads:

Free radicals serve many functions critical to normal human physiology; in addition, they foster many disease-related conditions. As we unravel the molecular-level details of cellular function, the mitochondria clearly play a significant role. This proposal is particularly interested in the role of cytochrome c (cyt c) in mitochondrial processes. With respect to oxidative phosphorylation, the role of cyt c is well understood. In an apparently unrelated chain of events, cyt c also plays a significant role in mitochondrial signaling leading to apoptosis. There are indications that cytochrome c has a “gain of function” related to the oxidation of lipids. Cytochrome c is a heme protein that has the potential to carryout peroxidase reactions resulting in free radicals. We propose to observe directly, using ESR, the free radical products resulting from the cyt c oxidation of lipids. This proposed research will take advantage of a recently developed electron spin resonance (ESR) method for directly detecting free radicals from enzyme reactions. This method uses immobilized enzymes to routinely achieve in situ ESR detection of transient radicals with lifetimes on the order of milliseconds. The method is extremely frugal in terms of the quantity of enzyme and substrate needed to perform an ESR experiment.

As of this date, the award has supported the purchase of the WebMO Pro, web-interface to Gaussian 03. Currently the free version of WebMO and Gaussian 03 is running on a MAC Pro and will soon be installed on Chris Fasano's (physics) parallel computer.

Ben, Blake, and Brad (hence referred to as B3) will begin our full time research efforts on May 26th, 2009. Stay tuned...