Teddy Bears

Ms Ong Mui Hong likes teddy bears a lot.

Apparently for the most part of last year, she was having teddy bear wallpapers on her laptop :P And one of her year 4 class last year found out about the actual date of her birthday, so they gave her teddy bears on that day. Maybe we should do that too :P

Here's how I discovered that. From today until Friday, I will be at the A* Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology at Proteos Building, Biopolis. So I won't be in school.  The one other person who was from ACS (I), going for this workshop thingy was Ms Fiona Ho's 2008 chairman. XD So we kinda gossip about our teachers when we came back from lunch XD

His name is Daryl (not Daryl Chen, different Daryl). Nice person. :) Seems like he wasn't from the class that made fun of FHO the most.... he seems like very goody goody two shoes

Today was awesome :)

Ok, so I arrived at IMCB at 7.10 in the morning, because Ethan needs to be in school by 7, and my mom is in Sweden. So I have to go to school is the same car as him. So I waited in the lobby thinking about life until 8:45 when it started. This is the lobby, and those round objects you see are apparently for people to sit on...

First was a kind of lab safety briefing thing. It took about an hour, but was actually very interesting. The labs here have Type 1 deionized water piped to taps directly from the water deionization plant. So there are three taps at the sink; warm, cold and deionized. The scientists here don't even need to wash the glassware that they use. After use, glassware is just placed in a green basket, and it is taken to the glassware washing machines for them. 

Then we got to the centrifuge safety part. Apparently a standard size centrifuge spins samples with the equivalent of 10'000 times the force of gravity. The rotor itself is 40kg. Thus in the case of a centrifuge accident, and the cap is blown off, the rotor will be sent flying with a total force of 400'000 Newtons. Cool ya?

As for autoclave safety, apparently autoclaves sometimes explode. There was this photo in the presentation of a US lab after an autoclave explosion... 

After that, we went to the lab to start. The labs are mostly biosafety Level 2 labs. Meaning that they can conduct experiments with hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, dengue fever, Salmonella, mumps, Bacillus subtilis, measles, HIV, [8] scrapie, MRSA, VRSA, etc. They also can do genetic engineering work. Extreme precautions are taken when dealing with biohazard sharps waste (needles, scalpel blades etc.), and access to the lab is restricted when work in in progress. 

Go read Biosafety Levels (click the words). It sounds like a lot of fun to work at a biosafety Level 4 lab :P (there are 4 levels, 1 being for labs dealing with the most harmless agents)

Anyway, the scientists also do not have to autoclave their biohazard waste themselves. That is also taken care of for them. There are multiple cold rooms on each level, some are -80 deg. C cryogenic chambers, while some are liquid nitrogen storage rooms. The sliding doors to all labs are motorized and instead of a push button to open it, there is a proximity sensor button on the side, so it can be opened when you are still wearing gloves and you don't contaminate the buttons. 

The experiments we were doing were about bacterial quorum sensing, basically the ability of bacteria to sense the size of their population. They need this, so that they know when their population is large enough to launch an immune system attack and produce pathogenic factors. They only attack when they know there are enough of themselves. Fascinating right?

The idea behind the research was to mutate the bacteria so that they lose this ability to sense their population size, something known as "quorum quenching". This is supposed to be an alternative approach from antibiotics. This leaves the bacteria still existing, but unable to produce pathogenic factors in a coordinated way.

We were supposed to test for the presence of some exoproteases that are part of quorum sensing, by using sea elegans, a kind of tiny worm thingy (nematode). Its a bit confulddling how the whole thing works, so I need to go figure it our first...

A lot of people were couldn't find their nematodes after they transferred a slice of agar gel from a prepared culture. They are microscopic.... so we spent a lot of time asking each other whether we could find ours XD

Anyway, we spent the morning culturing these nematodes. We also did the tri-parent bacteria mutation before lunch. Basically the process required the wild species of the bacteria plus two different strains of E. coli. One with the plasmid that allows for conjugation to happen, and the other with the plasmid that disrupts the quorum sensing mechanism. So we put all three of them on an agar plate, and mix them.

Lunch was 2 hours XD I went to Matrix Building to have lunch, cos I lazy take bus to go Holland Village or something like that. Most of us were back after 1 hour, so I spent the next 1 hour talking about our teachers with Daryl. :P

When I came back from lunch I pressed the wrong button in the lift. So I walked round the whole floor about 7 times trying to find my lab until I realized I was on the wrong floor. The problem is the inside of the building is hugely confusing. All the corridors are the same, and to make things worse the building is some strange polygon shape and has no parallel sides, so corridors intersect at weird angles like 30 and 150 degrees.

Actually, if one of the scientists hadn't helped me get into level 3, I wouldn't have been walking around cluelessly for 30 min. XD Sorry. The doors to the lab corridors are access card protected. I had a card for level 4. I had a problem getting into level 3, then this scientist behind me came up and lent me her card. Never-mind, it was a kind gesture that is still greatly appreciated :)

After lunch we did serial dilution. Basically, to reduce the population density of the bacteria, and kill off all the bacteria except the modified version of the species we were observing. We were using prepared bacteria cultures, due to lack of time, so I dun think we get to see the one's we did before lunch...

Went home after that.

It must be awesome to work there :D

I previously had these worries about being stuck around with boring people if I ever become a scientist. These were put to rest today :D This lab group has a lot of very interesting people. Also, forget those stereotypes of boring professors with frizzy hair. The researchers we were working with are very interesting people :D

Not so long ago, after the whole SRC mess up, I was ready to kill all my dreams of scientific research and chase a career in design instead.

I guess today gives me a reason to think about that decision one more time.