Overheard in the lab this afternoon

A (non-scientist, non-academic) lab visitor, getting a lab tour, upon meeting a graduate student and hearing that he was in his third year: "Oh, so you only have one year left!"

BPS: Home again, home again, jiggity jig

Went to the emerging single molecules technologies platform today, and caught the last four talks or so. The Pacific Biosciences presentation was very impressive. As a byproduct of their sequencing technology, they were able to measure a large number of interesting rates and parameters on the elongation activity of T7 DNA polymerase, and produced statistics very similar to the ones our lab has produced on RNA polymerase about sequence dependent pausing, for instance. One of their big innovations is the development of these dNTPs with fluorophores on the end of the phosphate. It seems to me like rATP with this kind of fluorophore could be very useful for general biophysical studies, and I wonder if they would consider making it available to the wider community (at a price, of course.) We certainly know enough people at PB to find out.

I headed back to the hotel, packed up, grabbed some lunch, and headed out to the airport, but I got bumped off the flight in exchange for a free round trip ticket (not like I was going to go into the lab after getting back anyway). I got put on a later flight at 6PM, so with four hours or so to kill, instead of sitting at the airport, I called up the airport Hilton and got them to send around the courtsey shuttle. It's much more pleasant than the airport, and I'm currently ensconced in an easy chair in the lobby, about five minutes away from the airport, with a pile of papers that I printed out at my hotel, and wifi. Could be worse. Now the question is: where should I go with my free ticket? Suggestions?

BPS, Day something or another

Tuesday, must be Paris. At the "Emerging Single Molecules" talk, I think I saw the first thing this morning that actually really impressed me. Steve Chu's group is trying to push the limits on single molecule colocalization. The approach is pretty much the standard two-color co-localization system, but with some very high tech stuff to bring it as close to the theoretical limit as possible, including:

• Active stabilization of the optics to prevent image drift
• Active stabilization of the sample to keep it in the optimal part of the field of view
• Calibration of CCD non-homogeneity to average out errors due to pixel-to-pixel variations

They demonstrated an accuracy of about 0.2 - 0.4 nm, which is pretty amazing.

Thompson et al has been cited and mentioned specifically in every talk so far.

Somewhat interesting talk on single molecule SEM on gold nanocrystals by Yuji Sasaki. I believe I heard him speak about this work when he was doing this with X-rays, and obviously this is a lot more convenient. Unfortunately he only had a very tiny amount of control data, but it was a 30 frame 10 ms time resolved image of tethered brownian motion. Seems cool. I actually thought about doing this some time ago with SEM, but since I know nothing about SEM, didn't really know if it was feasible. This looks promising, but complicated.

UPDATE: At the microfludics/nanofab workshop. Bob Austin's talk was really something, talking about microfluidics devices for separation using a really novel method, what he calls "bump arrays". Very neat stuff, some very cool pictures and movies. In typical fashion, Bob spent a lot of time talking about the Navier-Stokes equation in excrutiating detail, probably just to piss off the biologists. I studied the N-S equation in great detail when I was in his lab, and even I had some problems following his point at times, but the results were indisputably amazing. Some videos available here, but not as cool as the ones he showed, they don't really convey the gee-whiz factor.

BPS, Day 3

Got some quick dinner last night after the afternoon session and went to hear the single molecule workshop, hear Richard Ebright and Paul Selvin speak, but then cut out early to have a drink with Steve Block, Arne Gennerich, and Michael Diehl. My head has taken a definite turn for the worse, and yesterday was a long day on only 4 hours of sleep, so I slept in a bit this morning. Lessons learned so far at BPS this year: never ask people, "So, are you up for tenure yet?"

UPDATE:
Back at the hotel, waiting for my college roommate Garf to come pick me up for dinner. I attended some of the sessions on intrinsically disordered proteins, but was not really impressed. How would one assay for protein disorder at the single molecule level? That's one problem I'm starting to think about. Saw some neat posters, there seem to be a lot of people combining optical trapping with fluorescence in one way or another. Once again spent more time schmoozing than actually looking at posters. Had lunch with an old friend of my dad's, Peter Ford at MIT. He was one of the people who inspired me to go into physics in the first place (he was a central character in my college admissions essay), and it's always good to see him. He took me to Sel de la Terre, which was fantastic. Highly recommended.

BPS, Day 2

Gah, was out late whooping it up with the Block Lab, first at East Ocean City Restaurant (colloquially referred to as "Illegal Seafood"). We ate one of these, among other things:
We then went out drinking more.

I have a head cold and didn't sleep well last night, so I'm functioning on four hours of sleep and a lot of coffee. I did make it for the 8:15AM session, and ran into pretty much the whole Selvin lab (past and present) at Jeff Reifenberger's talk on his work at Helicos. Then I went over to the RNA folding session.

Saw some very interesting stuff this afternoon on HIV RNAs, and then came down to the optical spectroscopy session, and dear Lord it is packed to overflowing with people who want to hear about STED, STORM, and all that jazz. Literally, there are people sitting in the aisles.

UPDATE
Lunch with Ziggy in Chinatown, then back for posters. I usually don't last more than 45 minutes at the posters, I have such a short attention span, with all those people around, but this year I was there for a good 2 - 2.5 hours straight, there were so many people to talk to. Saw some old friends, and met some interesting new people, saw some good science, though nothing that totally blew me away.

Worst poster title:

Worst excuse for a poster EVAR: