Thanks!

Just wanted to close out the BPS week with the following graph showing my traffic over the past 30 days:













That big jump there is when the BPS put my blog on the front page. Quite impressive! Thanks to everybody for visiting! Now that the BPS is over, I hope you stick around!

BPS Tuesday Reflections

I had lunch today with a PI whose lab I applied to several years ago when I was looking for postdoctoral positions. I eventually settled on Steve's lab, but he's one of the nicest guys I've met, and we serendipitously got together at the meeting and had an hour or so to chat. It really gave me a lot of perspective on where my career has come from, and where it's going, the latter question being on my mind a lot lately. I think, if I'm coming away from this conference with anything, it's a commitment to do what I want, and what I think is interesting, rather than what other people think I should think is interesting, and damn the consequences. The fun science isn't usually the easy science, and the science that conventional wisdom holds to be "important" or "interesting" isn't always fun. If Gordon's Law of Maximal Uselessness holds true, and science fails 90% of the time, you're better off having fun than trying too hard to impress people, because your attempts to impress people will probably be futile anyway, and this way, at least you had fun!

I wandered around some posters, listened to some talks about chromatin, and am going to head off for dinner, then back again for the superresolution talks. I have some business at Stanford in the middle of the day that can't be moved around tomorrow afternoon, so I might just stay at home tomorrow, rather than come up for two hours and go back. So, keep your pants and your powder dry, science aficionados, and don't miss your flight!

Intarwebs Scarcity

The lack of wifi in the conference rooms and the relative difficulty of getting on the conference center wifi even in the lobby is making this a bit rough.  I'm back to phone blogging.

William Shih's talk on DNA origami was fascinating, but I didn't really get a sense of how likely some of these more complex structures were to form.  They're pretty though!

After an excellent dinner with colleagues, much beer, and watching the American curling team get trounced by the Chinese, we came back for the national lecture, but got shunted into an overflow room.  It seems like the conference planners just didn't plan for this vig of a conference.

The national lecture was good though.  Roger Tsien really is a great speaker, and his work on genetically encoded EM reporters is really great.

Tonight there are three simultaneous sessions from 4 to 6 all of which I wan to attend: Biotechnology, Genome Organization, and Force Spectroscopy.  Argh.

At The Chieftan with Block Lab!

Thermo Fisher Makes $6B bid for Millipore

Via my father, oddly enough (he's a transactional attorney, not a scientist, so I guess this is the closest our lives come to overlapping):

Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., the world’s largest maker of lab instruments, made an unsolicited takeover offer of about $6 billion for Millipore Corp., according to a person close to the situation.

More here.

On a more positive note

I'm a bit of a curmudgeon (actually, I'm a lot of a curmudgeon) so it's easy for me to complain, and as a postscript, I thought I'd say some nice things:

• The talk at imaging and spectroscopy on mNeptune looks like it will be incredibly useful. It's a new fluorescent protein that just sneaks into the water window. You can excite it with 633 nm, and detect it at 650, allowing you to do intravital imaging while avoiding hemoglobin absoprtion. I suspect many people will find that very useful.
• Two different talks on superresolution imaging of neurons are starting to show the real promise of superresolution imaging. The attempt to use it to trace all the neurons in a brain sample looks very ambitious, and I appreciate ambitious. Of course, the problem is it's sloooowwwww. If you have to fix the cell, why can't you use EM? That's a genuine question, by the way. Why can't you just do EM on brain slices and trace neurons that way, with way more resolution than you can get with any fluorescence technique? There must be a reason this doesn't work. Are they hard to stain with EM probes? Do they degrade rapidly under EM? Inquiring minds want to know.

BPS Day 3: Monday, must be Paris

Finally found 1) a seat, 2) an outlet, and 3) an IP address (the Moscone center wifi seems to be pretty overloaded. You'd think a famous important science blogger would be able to get an IP address, but I guess the hardware doesn't distinguish.)

Some thoughts on last night's single molecule workshop:

• The workshop was chaired by Steve Quake, and the first talk went to one of his colleagues who basically used the time to demonstrate the commercially available sequencing machine that Steve's company, Helicos, has on the market. He talked about the science behind it, but it wasn't really a "workshop" insofar as he didn't demonstrate single molecule techniques that you could do in your lab. It was a promotional session for a self-contained commercial product for sequencing. I think this was in pretty poor taste. Aside from that, he spoke very highly of their read lengths, topping all of 35 bases. Steve Block very pointedly asked what he thought the upper limit on their read lenghts were, and the speaker started waxing about the biochemical limitations. When Steve pressed him for a number, he said, I think, 100 base pairs (though I might have misheard, and he may have said 500. But if he said 500, I don't believe him anyway.) The reason that Steve pressed him, of course, is the fact that Pacific Biosciences is now boasting an instrument with several hundred base pair read length, which suggests that the Helicos instrument has a very limited future. Of course, Pac Bio doesn't have an instrument on the market yet, and Helicos does, and there are a lot of advantages to being first to market. So who knows.
• Zev Bryant's talk was interesting. He described double headed mutants of myosin that could be made to switch directions at will, and described processive motors made out of myosin heads that had basically protein logs between them. I'm surprised that you get processivitiy out of such things, but I guess if the ATP is low enough, the heads spend most of their time bound to the actin, so they're naturally processive. I'd like to see optically switchable myosins, and I'm sure he's working on it. Genetically encodable optical switches seem to be a growing theme, I'm seeing a lot of it all over the place here.
• Adam Cohen's talk was a bit silly, I think. He used glass lenses on top of coverslips to create highly confined spaces, 1 nm up, between the glass and the lens, and looked at proteins diffusing. Things undergo confined quasi-2D diffusion, so they stay in the field of view longer without being tethered. But most people are trying to develop assays that get molecules further from the surface, to minimize surface effects. Here, the surface effects are huge, and this is sold as a benefit. The technique didn't solve any particular problem, it didn't present any new science, and it presents a host of new problems. On the other hand, at least it was fun, and fun is good.

At Hotel Utah with Assorted Weirdos

New, Notable, Emerging

The 'New and Notable' talks were quite interesting, and invigorated me a bit.  It's always fun hearing about cool applications of new technology.  I learned a lot, especially about optics from the talk on adaptive optics imaging.

I noticed a peculiar schizophrenia of mine though.  When I hear about new techniques, I usually think, "That's cool, but what is it good for?"  But when I hear about biological problems approached with established techniques, I usually yawn and think, "Nice, but not novel."  I guess I'm looking for the rare hybrid of novel new technology being used to solve interesting problems, which in some sense is what biophysics is about (to ab experimentalist.)

Now at 'Emerging Single Molecule Techniques.'  Guess we'll see if there are any unicorns to be had...

Day 2 morning: a minor complaint

I got here in time this morning to see part of the nucleic acids/protein interaction talks.  It was packed,with people standing along the walls.  I stepped out, and when I came back, I was told by one of the Moscone droids that the room was full and I wasn't allowed in.  That seems like pretty poor planning.

'New and Notable' is getting under way...

BPS2010 Day 1: Laptop Fail

My laptop is failing to boot, gentle reader, so my BPS blogging may have to ve via my Palm Pre, and hence less verbose that is my wont. I'll try to work around it. Just letting you know.

Walking towards the conference center this afternoon, I was reminded of my first BPS, also in San Francisco. It was an unusually warm February, I was young and excited about science, and, arriving from the midwest's gelid winter, I remember feeling like this was one of the greatest cities in the world. Ten years or so on, and I'm no longer as fresh faced, but I still think San Francisco is my favorite city in the US. And considering that this may well be my last BPS, the symmetry is elegant.

The first talk out of the gate at the flurescence subgroup was Steve Blocks which was...not about fluorescence. I'm not sure why Steve was asked to speak (and neither was he, really), and he stuck mostly to the mechanics of the kinesin cycle. I think this was a particularly odd choice, since the fluorescence subgroup is usually technique-heavy (as the name implies). I think talking about optical trapping in general, as a technique, and comparing it's pros and cons versus fluorescence, would have been more interesting to the group at hand.

In the middle of the next talk, the power went down for about ten minutes. Nice work, Moscone center!

Eric Greene's work with "DNA curtains" looks very promising for biotech and research applications. (I'll include links and pictures later when I can get to a working PC.) By microfabricating onto the coverglass surface, they're able to make very reliable distributions of stretched DNA molecules, both with and without flow, and control the density very carefully. Looks very exciting!

During the cookie break, I hobnobbed with all the usual suspects: Ahmet Yildiz (a co-conspirator of mine in Paul Selvin's lab, now setting up his lab at Berkeley), Michael Woodside, Ibrahim Cisse (previously at Taekjip Ha's lab at UIUC and now post-docing in Paris), and Sterling Churchman (postdocing at UCSF) among others. Lab space, construction, the hiring of grad students and postdocs...all very exciting!

I stuck around to see the Young Fluorescence Investigator Award, which was given to JW Borst. In the past, the YFIA has generally gone to people associated with UIUC and/or the Laborator for Fluorescence Dynamics in some way or another. But since Enrico Gratton has moved the LFD to Irvine, I think it has diffused somewhat. I didn't know anything about Prof Borst's work before today, and was not totally blown away. He's using fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) to look at interaction of different factors in the cell. It looks interesting enough, but it didn't seem particularly novel to me. Maybe I'm missing something.

I was also surprised by the choice of Dan Axelrod for the Gregorio Weber prize. Dan has certain made a significant contribution to fluorescence through his introduction of TIRF microscopy. But I seem to recall that Dan left U Michigan very abruptly about six or so years ago, leaving a few people in the lurch, and has been laying low in California since then, apparently doing experiments out of his basement. I guess it was an easy commute for him at least. He's still listed on the U Michigan web page as having emeritus status. Who knows.

The Block lab, past and present, gathered together for dinner after the afternoon's talks, and then half of the lab returned to go see the evening motility talks (by Steve Rosenfeld) and the other half went over to the W Hotel and continued to drink in earnest until around half past midnight. We had a good time. Tomorrow morning (if I get up in time): protein-nucleic acid interactions ahoy!

A New Era in Information Overstimulation

I'm going to be experimenting with this thing the kids are calling the "IntarTwitters". I'll be Twittering about the meeting here, so you can follow me from talk to talk, listen to my approval and/or disapprobation at various talks, and possibly even engage in some two way (or more way!) dialogue about the meeting. Let's give this whole technology thingy a whirl!

A Bit About Me

Thanks to the BPS, I will shortly have some new readers (hello, new readers!) so I wanted to give you a bit of an update about me, who I am, where I am, and where you'll find me at the BPS meeting this year.

I'm a postdoctoral fellow in Steve Block's lab at Stanford (he of the famous cappuccino machine) where I have been working on developing combined optical trapping and single molecule FRET, and using that to study ribozyme structure and function. My graduate work was done at UIUC in Paul Selvin's lab, mostly doing single molecule fluorescence (although we did do a bit of FRAP and confocal microscopy back when I was starting.) As the title of the blog suggests, I'm pretty interested in single molecule biophysics.

At the BPS on Saturday, I'll be attending the fluorescence subgroup (always a reliable gathering of UIUC alumni, and in particular people who studied under Enrico Gratton and/or Gregorio Weber), as well as sticking my head in the door at the motility subgroup. I don't do any work on motility personally, but just about everybody I've ever worked with does, so you kind of get exposed to it by proxy.

During the meeting proper, I'll probably be attending mostly the platforms on RNA, fluorescence techniques, and force spectroscopy. But I do occasionally like to show up to random talks that I don't know anything about, and see if I can learn something. Unfortunately, given Sturgeon's Law, these talks usually don't teach me much, and I wind up falling asleep.

The other thing I will be doing a lot of is drinking. I find that conferences in general are about 50% science, and 50% schmoozing, and the schmoozing almost always takes place over drinks. To that end, I will have friends in town, and I am going to make an effort to go out on Saturday night. If all goes as planned, I'm probably going to hit the lounge at the W Hotel near the convention center and catch up with old friends and new. Feel free to stop by!

P.S. I'm also currently looking for jobs! See the link on the right for my CV!

Meet your New Blogging Overlord

That's right, fans and fairies, I've been chose to be one of a select cadre of 2010 Biophysical Society Bloggers. I will be blogging live (LIVE I TELL YOU!) from the 2010 BPS meeting right here in San Francisco*. As a results, I will be endowed with great super powers. And an iPod nano, apparently.

So, buckle your seatbelts! It's going to be quite a ride! In a couple of weeks, when they formally link my blog to the BPS home page, I'll write a formal introduction to the poor lost souls who haven't seen the true destructive power of this fully operational blogostation. Until that time, I should probably try to get back into the swing of things and, you know, BLOG about SCIENCE once in a while.

*Yes, I am not technically in San Francisco. I am in Stanford, CA, a whole 40 minutes away by car. But if you're reading this on the intarwebs, I'm probably a lot closer to San Francisco than you are.