Category: Brain Candy
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Antibody PTMs: Tiny Chemical Accessories With Main-Character Energy
Antibodies are marketed like they were manufactured by angels: uniform, consistent, and spiritually incapable of variation. But in the wild, antibodies are proteins…… meaning they are chemistry wearing a lab coat. Even if your amino-acid sequence is fixed, an antibody can accumulate small chemical edits during expression, purification, formulation, storage, shipping, and the tragic event…
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Transposons: The Genome’s Most Unbothered Freeloaders (and Why They’re Kind of Brilliant)
🧬😅 I have a soft spot for transposons… which is a mildly unhinged confession if you’re the kind of person who loves genomes for their elegant, well-behaved architecture. Because transposons are not elegant. They’re the opposite of tidy: more chaos gremlin than minimalist masterpiece… 🙂and yet… here I am, writing a whole blog about them…
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eVLP: Tiny Protein Disco Balls That Teach Your Immune System New Dance Moves
Chapter 1: “All Costume, No Crime” A virus-like particle (VLP) is what it sounds like: a particle that looks like a virus, but is not a fully functional virus. Most VLPs are built from viral structural proteins that naturally self-assemble into nanoscale shells resembling the original virus, except they lack the viral genome needed for…
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3’ RACE: The “Find My Ending” Experiment
This is blog about an experiment that feels like a personality test. 😅 So, somewhere between my third cup of coffee and the moment I realized I’d been wearing my lab coat inside-out for an entire morning, I decided today was going to be a 3’ RACE day. 🥲☕️ There’s a specific kind of confidence…
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TRP120, the disappearing act, and the serum that snitched
A few days ago I wrote a blog summarizing what TRP120 does (very politely: “host manipulation”; less politely: “cellular chaos with a smile”), and I compared WT vs. ΔTRP120 mutant… (👀click here). But then your inner scientist (and your inner anxious gremlin) might have asked the obvious question: If the gene is disrupted… how do…
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Alternative Speculations on ΔTRP120’s Low Bacteremia: The “I Have No Evidence But Hear Me Out” Edition
Disclaimer first… This entire post is my speculation! 🧠😂 So, before anyone warms up a reviewer comment like “citation needed”…yes. Everything below is my imagination wearing a lab coat. It’s reasonable imagination, with immunology facts and trafficking logic… but still imagination. I’m not claiming these are true. I’m claiming these are the kinds of ideas…
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Your Bloodstream Is a Party… and Ehrlichia Brought a “Stay In The Blood” Spell
(aka: 🤔 How does a bacterium manage to still be in your bloodstream right when a tick shows up to feed?) Ticks are here for the blood party — they show up, suck blood, and leave. If ticks are the bus, then Ehrlichia is the passenger in your bloodstream who’s standing at the curb with their…
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Playing Genetic Roulette with Ehrlichia japonica
Some experiments feel like chess…you plan, you predict, you move pieces with purpose. Random mutagenesis is not chess… Random mutagenesis is buying a stack of scratch-off tickets, except the tickets are a bacterial genome, the store is your tissue culture hood, and the cashier is time itself…cold, silent, and absolutely not impressed by how many…
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“To Bite or Not to Bite” … A Philosophical Debate Between Two Ticks in the Leaf Litter
It was a damp evening in the understory … the kind of humidity that makes your exoskeleton feel moisturized and your spiracles whisper, “Yes, queen.” Under a curled oak leaf, two ticks sat like tiny, judgmental philosophers at a coffee shop that only serves blood. On the left was Ixodes scapularis … the blacklegged tick.…
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The Gel Casting Protocol I’m Writing So I Don’t Forget It Tomorrow
🧪Tomorrow I’m going to cast an SDS-PAGE gel. Not a heroic gel. Not a “for publication” gel. Just a gel. The kind you cast because you need bands.🙂 I also suspect this might be my last hand-cast gel of grad school, which feels oddly symbolic. Like closing a chapter by doing free-radical polymerization with shaking…