No, actually that's very interesting. Did you know what you were looking for when you started, or did you just shoot at several directions at once and checked what made an impact? Do you have analytical results, or only experimental ones?
It was basically a review paper, so there was no experimentation involved. I pored through hundreds of abstracts and scores of papers trying to find what was already out there. What the studies had found, what they had concluded, and more importantly, what they didn't know. I came across some pretty weird things. Some lipids are pretty straightforward, and they do the same thing always, and then there are ones that act differently in cloned systems vs. native systems, and ones that act extracellularly (how the hell did they get on the other side of the membrane?), and ones that have opposite effects on different channels, and it's all very wacky. The purpose was to take everything in the literature and put it in one paper so people could get an idea of what our current knowledge was. I was two references away from having a hundred, although, admittedly, I used up gobs just describing what voltage-gated potassium channels were. I'd say the lipid modulator papers comprised less than half. Wait, hold on, I can do this! Ah, it's more than half, actually, even taking out the two sections where I basically summarized a review and stole all its references.
I still didn't get a chance to even open the book you gave me as a present in August. Lame me.
It's okay, you've been busy. But when you're not, it will keep you happily busy. Okay, that construction didn't work well with the sense.
YAY P-C, but seriously? I read that all as "blla blah banana blah blah blah electricity blah blah blah cooked banana"
That's cause you weren't even trying. :-P (And if you were, I really could try to break it down even further, perhaps using fruit metaphors, since you like bananas.)
cloned systems vs. native systems
What exactly are the two? I'm not familiar with the terms.
The purpose was to take everything in the literature and put it in one paper so people could get an idea of what our current knowledge was.
I think that's very important. Just knowing what questions to ask when trying to understand a phenomena is a really big step. go you!
I was two references away from having a hundred
98 is a much nicer number than 100. It has that lovely combination of 3² and 2³
And CBS' answer to NBC's successful midseason drama "Medium" is "Ghost Whisperer," a Jennifer Love Hewitt-starring vehicle based on the work of James Van Praagh about a newlywed communicating with dead people who have not quite crossed over to the other side.
WHO IS TO BLAME FOR THIS?!?
You can plead not guilty even if everybody knows it was you. Even if you know you're guilty, you can plead not guilty.
Rice during her Iraq visit: "This war came to us, not the other way around."
Niiiice juxtaposition of posts. We can only hope that the rest of the first quote:
It is just that, in situations like that, you're gonna have to expect the jury to call you a liar and find you guilty, and possibly line up to kick you in the butt on your way to prison.
has some validity.
cloned systems vs. native systems
What exactly are the two? I'm not familiar with the terms.
Ah, heh, yeah. I thought I could get by with that. In a cloned system, you express the channel in a model system (like Xenopus oocytes or Chinese hamster ovary cells, although sometimes you do use cells that are supposed to have the channels) by sticking the DNA into them. The native system is the naturally occurring channel. When you just stick the channel DNA into a cell, that's all you get. The channel. In the native system, though, there are dozens of things that happen to the channel that maybe you didn't take into account when making your model system, you know? Auxiliary subunits that co-associate with it (often the lipids actually modulate
them
rather than the channel itself, so you might see a very different effect compared to when you just stuck the channel in a cell), post-translational modification (maybe in the actual cell, the channel gets a bunch of sugars attached to it), or hell, maybe just expression levels. It's the biggest fuck you in science: you examine something in a model system, and then it doesn't work out when you look at it in a human cell.
It's the biggest fuck you in science: you examine something in a model system, and then it doesn't work out when you look at it in a human cell.
I've always wondered how computer modelling can be involved reliably in research, because I thought the point of research was to see if unexpected things happen and unless the computers involved are very clever, you can't tell it to look for something you never thought of looking for.
I've always wondered how computer modelling can be involved reliably in research, because I thought the point of research was to see if unexpected things happen and unless the computers involved are very clever, you can't tell it to look for something you never thought of looking for.
I don't know what it says about me that this was the topic of my first internet community kerfuffle. lo these many years ago. I wonder what happened to that group.
I thought the point of research was to see if unexpected things happen and unless the computers involved are very clever, you can't tell it to look for something you never thought of looking for.
I'm figuring if you set up rules (that are right), you may encounter violations of them in model testing that seem counter-intuitive. And it is possible (in theory) to totally get how this mechanism works, but not be sure what happens when you switch the inputs.
I don't know what it says about me that this was the topic of my first internet community kerfuffle. lo these many years ago. I wonder what happened to that group.
The rest of the group were actually computer simulations.
