I freaking blog ALL THE TIME. I really need to get a life. I'm waiting for the results of my second attempt at fish cupid-ry this morning. The first set gave me about 90 embryos, and not all of those will end up being fertilized, so that's basically useless to me. I need at least 150 to go forward with any kind of useful experiment. I could do a half-assed experiment but I'd just have to repeat it, and I don't have time for all those shenanigans at this point - I only have 3 and a half weeks left (*BIG SMILE*). I just don't understand how a gang mating of 15-20 fish can produce so little.
In case you've ever wondered about exactly what I do to these innocent fish, well I'll tell you. Because I have nothing better to do. I have a solution that I inject into them - literally, using a very fine needle that I have to first break the tip off of (under the microscope) and calibrate to make sure I know how much I'm putting in - and this solution contains a small piece of synthetic DNA that will alter which genes the embryo is capable of using for the first few days of it's development. We target specific genes by this technique to see what happens during development when those specific genes aren't available (and therefore the proteins that those genes ultimately produce are not available). I work on the folic acid/vitamin B12 pathway. The loads of folic acid in prenatal vitamins are important for development because folic acid supplementation has been shown to reduce the risk of congenital heart and neural tube defects (like spina bifida for example) in human babies. When we screw with the availability of the proteins in that pathway, we hinder the fish's ability to metabolize folic acid, so we're basically mimicking a situation in which folic acid isn't available to the embryo (like, say, when a woman doesn't know she's pregnant and hasn't been supplemented with it yet). So we use these methods to help us figure out exactly what's going on at the molecular level that causes these particular defects when folic acid isn't available during development, with fish as a model for humans (because they share a lot of the same developmental processes, proteins and pathways). Obviously we don't really care about folic acid metabolism in fish - we just use them to try and understand more about humans. I say that because sometimes people think that I "study fish" which seems pretty useless (and I would agree with that statement) but I really don't give a hoot about the fish themselves, they're just a useful tool since we can't (nor would we want to!) do these experiments in humans fetuses. And for those ladies among you, don't worry about your folic acid levels prior to pregnancy - we fortify all our milled grain products (bread, etc) in the US with folic acid specifically BECAUSE it's so important in the early stages of development and we don't want any pregnant ladies being completely depleted of FA before they know they're pregnant. Based on the work we've done in fish, it actually looks like folic acid is MOST important in the first few weeks of pregnancy before most women even know they're pregnant anyway. We're working on solidifying that data - if you frequently read scientific journals maybe you'll see it sometime in the next year or so :) I hope. I need a publication.
Anyway, my timer is going off in less than 30 seconds now so I gotta go check on the fishies. Hope you enjoyed the brief tutorial :)
Quick update - fishy blind date #2 is more-or-less a flop, so far. Boo. I gotta get a Barry White tape in there or something. Dribble some "sex panther" in the tank maybe... hey, "60% of the time it works, every time". I'd take 60%!
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