Arrived at BPS

Free wifi at the convention center, huzzah. Got a workout in this morning, and am going to split my time between the fluorescence subgroup and maybe duck into the intrinsically disordered proteins subgroup for a bit. Most of the rest of the Block lab will probably be at the motility subgroup. Then, Block Lab dinner tonight with current and former Blockheads.

UPDATE
Kind of disappointed with the biological fluorescence subgroup, the talks this afternoon were very technical and not terribly interesting, to me at least. Skipped out a bit early before the business meeting, and ran into some old UIUC LFD people (back when the LFD was at UIUC.) Also bumped into Anne Gershenson (former Selvin lab postdoc now at Brandeis) outside the intrinsically disordered proteins subgroup. One thing I'm finding is that people who I haven't seen in a couple of years need to look at my nametag because they don't recognize me with short hair, sans glasses and 20 unneeded pounds (c.f. here). But the up side is that people I don't care to talk to I don't even need to worry about! They won't know it's me anyway.

UPDATE 2:
Dave Piston's talk on the history of fluorescence microscopy was very entertaining ("From Pond Scum to Single Molecules.") Apparently, the foundation for most of the superresolution technologies that we've seen recently were predicted in a paper in 1932. Dave said at the end of the talk before taking questions that he was afraid that somebody who had been at a 1908 meeting that he referenced might come forward to correct him about something, at which point Watt Webb took the mic (natch.)

BPS ahoy!

That's right kids, it's time for the 53rd Annual Biophysical Society Meeting! I may do some live blogging while I'm there, but my proposed itinerary (with some overlaps that I will negotiate in real time) can be found here. Some of the highlights (in my personal, highly myopic opinion):

• My former colleague from the Selvin lab, Jeff Reifenberger, will be giving a platform talk on his work with Helicos, Steve Quake's company (8:15AM Sunday)
• Lots of talks on superresolution microscopy at the imaging and optical microscopy platform on Sunday morning.
• A Sunday workshop on Advanced Single Molecule Fluorescence Techniques in Vitro and in Vivo, featuring Richard Ebright, Paul Selvin, and Jeff Gelles.
• Bob Austin will be giving a talk at the Nanotechnology/Microfluids workshop, which is surprising since, as far as I can recall, he almost never comes to BPS. So, that should be interesting.

There will be tons of interesting stuff, of course, and I'd be interested in hearing other peoples' opinions about what not to miss! Feel free to post comments with your thoughts.

iTrap

From Hands-on with optical tweezers: a multitouch interface for holographic optical trapping:

I was scanning this paper for some sort of scientific justification.  Near the beginning, they say,  "The widespread deployment of multiple-trap optical tweezers..."  Really?  I'm in the optical tweezers field, and obviously it's a different part of the field altogether, but I seriously have my doubts that these instruments are widespread.  I don't even know what they're used for.  I looked around Arryx's web site, and found:

Because our technology can use multiple laser beams at low power to hold an object, it is ideal for handling cells and other sensitive objects and materials. The BioRyx 200 system can be used to collect specified types of cells from a mixed suspension, manipulate cells for enhanced viewing, measure cell-cell interactions and cell-object interactions, and hold sample material for further investigation or isolation.

Okaaaayyyy...I don't do cell biology, but I don't know any labs that do that have one of these.  But, whatever, they've been in business for a while (I even know people who work at Arryx), so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.  But "widespread" may be pushing it a bit.

The other bit of justification was:

We believe that the capacity for true real-time independent control of numerous

simultaneous traps, coupled with visual feedback directly beneath the user’s fingertips, besides providing increased experimental throughput and faster training of the operator, will open many doors in interdisciplinary research. For example, this system could be used in studies of motile cells, or single-cell microsurgery.

Cell motility studies with optical traps, like this one from 1989?  I don't mean to sound like a playa hater, I understand the gee-whiz factor, it's pretty neat.  But, let's just say that I'm glad that this was done in the UK, beacuse I would hate to think that they were spending my tax dollars on it.

More on imaging single spins

Dan Rugar spoke on Tuesday about their new work on imaging single spins, a topic I've blogged about before. He provided some interesting new data, as well as some interesting benchmarks. Right now, they can detect about an attonewton, but the force from a single nuclear spin is closer to about 10 zeptonewtons (1e-20), so they're still trying to get the resolution down to the single atom level. (Their previous work on single spin detection was on electron spins.)

The main way of driving the noise down is to use ever higher field gradients. A normal medical MRI uses a field gradient much less than 1 tesla/meter, but by using teeny magnets, they can get about 5 megateslas/meter, or about 50 Gauss/nanometer. It's still not quite good enough, though, and apparently they are not sure why they're not getting better field gradients. The gradients are off from their calculations by about an order of magnitude, for unknown reasons.

He did show some nice images of single tobacco mosaic virus particles:

But the 3D scan shown here contains about 8000 points, at 1 minute per point, so it required about 135 hours to collect! His comment about the time, though, was interesting: if you're talking about getting full scale 3D images of every single atom in an object with atomic resolution, and the ability to resolve chemical species, then the current technology you're competing against, X-ray crystallography, has a time scale of several months to infinity. So, 135 hours isn't so long to wait.

Speaking of Gauss: Steve Quake is now apparently blogging for the New York Times as a guest blogger. Check it out. His first column described the life of an academic researcher for those outside of the field, and his next column explored the divide between pure and applied sciences, in which he compares himself to Archmides, Gauss, and Lord Kelvin.

On the home front, I've been recently thinking about giving it all up and opening a sandwich stand. Or, perhaps, when I finish here, getting a degree in ECE from Stanford. Honestly, I think I'll do just about anything to stay out of the workforce until at least 2012 at this point.

Super Duper

I just stuck myself in the thumb with the Hamilton syringe that I use for loading radioactive RNA into gels.  Hopefully I'll get some cool super power as a result.  But it was hammerhead ribozyme RNA.  Does that mean I'll turn into a human/shark mutant hybrid with the capability of breathing underwater and tearnig people apart with my super powered jaws?  I hope so, beacuse that would be way cooler than turning into a human/viroid mutant hybrid.  That would just suck.