Michelle Wang named HHMI Scholar

Michelle Wang, a former Block-lab postdoc and optical trapping aficionado, has been named an HHMI scholar. The Wang lab works very much along the same lines as the Block lab, using optical trapping to study DNA interactions with various proteins, as well as fundamental DNA properties. They also have published some interesting work on an optical torque wrench, an instrument for applying and measuring torques to optically anisotropic particles using polarized light, in a manner similar to the way magnetic tweezers can be used with paramagnetic particles.

Also, the word coming down the grapevine is that Ahmet Yildiz has accepted a faculty position at Berkeley, though it does not appear to have been officially announced yet...more on this breaking news as it arrives!

Single atom imaging by TEM

From the cover of this week's issue of Nature, Meyer, et al show that TEM can be used to image individual atoms and molecules with high resolution if it is done against a graphene background. The video above is from the supplementary material, showing a single carbon chain suspended between two pieces of junk. It's a bit amusing that some of their most interesting data, showing carbon chains and polymers, is basically due to "vacuum contaimation", aka, crap in the chamber. But, it's interesting nonetheless. Admittedly, this has little to do with biology, and is unlikely to be very useful for biology because of the need to do it in vacuum. But it could be used to study fundamental polymer dynamics in interesting ways. Anyway, I just thought it was cool and worth mentioning.

New Directions in Biology-Based Music Videos

First, there was The PCR Song, in the We-Are-The-World style. Then UMass innovated in the rap genre with This Is How We Do It. Now, Eppendorf breaks fresh ground with their boy-band themed (and frankly a bit creepy) [It's Called] epMotion:



I'm not sure this is a good trend. I'm waiting for the death metal FRET videos to start appearing.

By the way, am I the only one who had a momentary internal freakout when you see the guy throw the pipetter? "OH MY GOD, THE CALIBRATION WILL BE ALL OFF! THE HUMANITY!!!!"

[Hat tip to Peter Anthony for pointing this out, on a Friday night at midnight, no less.]

Imaging HIV assembly in real time

A movie from a new paper, Imaging the biogenesis of individual HIV-1 virions in live cells: A video of fluorescent GFP-Gag, an HIV structural protein, assembling into individual virus particles. The actual assembly happens over about 40 minutes.