Reporting Live from the Surface of the Moon!

Hey everyone! I am officially back in the blogosphere; I'm sure I've been terribly missed. It's not that I haven't had anything to write about, I simply haven't had the time or the energy. But things are looking up (for now), and so I've decided to start writing again.

So far, this quarter has started off great. I'm in a new lab, doing new work, and I really like what I'm doing. This quarter I've joined a genetics lab, using the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. In English, fruit flies:

This particular lab is focused on neuron development, and we study neurons in fly eyes. It's actually pretty sweet. There's all kinds of little molecular genetic tricks that we can use that allow us to create individual mutant cells surrounded by normal cells. This way, we can directly compare the neurons from the same animal (which is an important consideration in genetics). It also means that we can now look at what effects certain mutations have in just the eye cells, instead of in every cell. This is important because a lot of mutations are lethal, and it's hard to study how an animal develops if it's dead. What this means for me is that I get to spend a bunch of time collecting virgin flies and dissecting brains. And when the whole fly is less than 2 millimeters long, it's nearly impossible to do.




These guys make it look easy, but trust me, it's actually pretty tough. However, I did manage to pull out one intact brain in my morning dissection practice, so hopefully I'll be able to work up to this level of proficiency.

The other thing that's awesome about this quarter (aside from the fact that last quarter is over) is that I'm not taking a class. So really, the only thing I have to do is work and go home. It's making things so much better. Trying to do research work, teach a class, and take a class, on top of all the various other things that pop up during the week, is just a recipe for disaster. It's not the fact that there's so much work to do, it's that everything becomes just another thing on the list. The mentality switches from trying to focus and learn something to just getting everything done. And even though everything did get done, it wasn't done nearly as well as it could have been, so then I feel like I've done bad work, even if I haven't. So yeah, this quarter I'm just doing my fly work, and teaching a class. I'm super stoked.